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Book Reviews of Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1)

Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1)
Pandora - New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1
Author: Anne Rice
ISBN-13: 9780099271086
ISBN-10: 0099271087
Publication Date: 4/1/1999
Pages: 406
Rating:
  • Currently 3.8/5 Stars.
 28

3.8 stars, based on 28 ratings
Publisher: Arrow
Book Type: Paperback
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

51 Book Reviews submitted by our Members...sorted by voted most helpful

reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 8 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 4
Good read and keeps you on your toes!
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 130 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 3
Anne Rice, creator of the Vampire Lestat, the Mayfair witches and the amazing worlds they inhabit, now gives us the first in a new series of novels linked together by the fledgling vampire David Talbot, who has set out to become a chronicler of his fellow Undead. The novel opens in present-day Paris in a crowded cafe, where David meets Pandora. She is 2,000 years old, a Child of the Millennia, the first vampire ever made by the great Marius. David persuades her to tell the story of her life. Pandora begins, reluctantly at first and then with increasing passion, to recount her mesmerizing tale, which takes us through the ages, from Imperial Rome to 18th-century France to 20th-century Paris and New Orleans.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on
Helpful Score: 2
Classic Anne Rice! Excellent, thought-provoking book. Vampire-lover or no, the historical information is amazing.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 33 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 2
In a crowded cafe in paris, a two thousand year old vampire tells her lifes story from herImperial Rome to eighteenth-century France to twentieth-century Paris and New Orleans.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 115 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 2
Not one of the better books in the Vampire Chronicles, but it wasn't bad either. Pandora is the tale of...you guessed it, Pandora. The books opens in Paris where fledgling, David, meets Pandora. It's basically a repeat of 'Interview' except that this time, it's David recording Pandora's story from her beginnings in ancient Rome when she was first created by none other than the great Marius, all the way to the present day where she is reunited with her long-lost love.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 11 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 2
as always very good read
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 48 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 2
Another of Anne Rice's dark, vampire series. Very good, if you like her style.
Moosie avatar reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 16 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 2
The title character is a highborn woman of Augustan Rome who later names herself after the Pandora of mythology, opening her own box of surprises. Sitting in a modern-day Paris cafe in the aftermath of a fresh kill, the vampire Pandora accepts the challenge of recounting her history and immediately sets to work, filling the blank pages of an elegant leatherbound notebook....
ALittleMagick avatar reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 8 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 2
Anne Rice is always a good read. This installment to the series met expectations.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 4 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 2
Good book. Not the best Anne Rice I have ever read but still worth reading.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 6 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1
A quick read without the depth or intensity of the books in the Vampire Chronicles. Simply an entertaining story, not very thought-provoking.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 54 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1
Although a good read, ont one of my favorite of Anne Rice's books. More or less, it is a repeat of the "Interview", but this time it is Pandora being interviewed. I've you've read and enjoyed the others before this book then you will enjoy it.
cheryll avatar reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 51 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1
anne rice is awesome and so is the book
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 7 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1
Not one of her best in comparison with Memoch the Devil, The Mummy or Feast of All Saints, but it is worth the read. It starts out a little slow and then slowly eases into the interesting stuff. For those of you who have read Blood and Gold, Pandora tells the other side of the story from Pandora's view (about her relationship with Marius, where she was when he was looking for her and how she became a vampire).
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on
Helpful Score: 1
"PANDORA" Is Anne Rice at her very best. I loved the book. It is about a highborn woman of Augustan Rome her time and her life ... or actually her non-life.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 11 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1
I love Anne Rice's vampire chronicles but this one was not what I thought, It was interesting to find out and get to know a little of how Marious was made and where he comes from. This book is about Pandora the first of the new vampires, whom I really did not get into..
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 21 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1
Not as good as the original Vampire Series in my opinion, but still a good Anne Rice read.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 41 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1
Doesn't live up to the original series, but not bad.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 232 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1
I felt like I came into the middle of a story and it was too slow.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 48 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1
This was a very good book.
Handlebars avatar reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 153 more book reviews
Amazon.com
Anne Rice fans will greet Pandora: New Tales of the Vampires, the first of her new vampire chronicles, as hungrily as the Fang Gang facing a fresh new neck. Our heroine, Pandora, a senator's daughter in Augustus Caesar's day, flees to Antioch when her family gets killed and discovers the antidote to stern Roman rationalism in the occult wisdom of the East. "Something attacked my reason," Pandora writes. "The very thing the Roman Emperors had so feared in Egyptian cults and Oriental cults swept over me: mystery and emotion which claim a superiority to reason and law."

Pandora gets her sexy vampire initiation at the fangs of handsome Marius (who later inducted Rice's famed vampire Lestat). Pandora tells how a nice Roman girl became a vampire in modern Paris, but mostly the book celebrates the sights and sounds (and philosophical bloodlettings) of the classical world. Pandora is more like Robert Graves's sublime I, Claudius than Rice's The Complete Vampire Chronicles.

Yet Pandora is a logical extension of Rice's work, and Pandora is a combination of her past vampire heroes and the nakedly, horrifyingly autobiographical heroine of Rice's 1997 novel Violin. Now, Violin is remarkably messy, but it captures the volcanic passion that erupts in her best work--Rice calls it "a study in pain." Pandora is really a dramatized debate between passion and reason, which Pandora calls "male reason." She teases her vampire mentor: "Marius guarded his delicate rationality as a Vestal Virgin guards a sacred flame. If ever any ecstatic emotion took hold of me, he [would] tell me in no uncertain terms that it was irrational, irrational, irrational!" (To hear how close Pandora's voice is to her passionate creator, listen to the 1997 audiocassette Interview with Anne Rice.)

Rice's research gives fresh blood to her storytelling. Even her chronic third-act problem scarcely slows down this brisk romp of a novel. Pandora has intellectual thirst as well as blood lust, and she conveys the high old time Rice obviously had imbibing historical lore. "It is fun to read these mad Gnostics!" exults Pandora in the early Christian era. It is also fun to read this mad Pandora. Anne Rice hasn't been this fun to read in years.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 31 more book reviews
"Seductive...[Rice] has returned to the source of her best work, her sexy and invincible vampaires.. Pandora is a superheroine: beautiful, of course, but also smart, fearless, independent, lusty, resourceful, and so pumped up at the end of her breathless narrative, she takes off for New Orleans, hot on the trail of Lestat and Marius."
"Eerily Vibrant.. The title character is a highborn woman of Augustan Rome who later names herself after the Pandora of mythology, opening her own box of surprises. Sitting in a modern-day Paris cafe in the aftermath of a fresh kill, the vampire Pandora accepts the challenge of recounting her history and immediately sets to work, filling the blank pages of an elegant leatherbound notebook... A wealth of narrative twists and period detail."
Cottonwoodrose avatar reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 9 more book reviews
Just like all the other Tales of the Vampire series, Anne Rice holds us and keeps us totally interested from the first page to the last.
HannaM avatar reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 64 more book reviews
I really enjoyed this anne rice book. i have read her mayfair witches and the original vampire books and this one definately had something different. it was more light hearted, the characters were not so serious, but at the same time you still understood that the vamps were deadly and strong. this was a very good book to read if you like historical fiction. even if you arent into paranormal fiction i would still recommend it. and if you are in to both then all the better!
mpmarus avatar reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 133 more book reviews
i hadn't read an anne rice for years and now i remember why. not a bad book, really, just not a very good one.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 2 more book reviews
This was the first vampire book I've ever read and at first I thought it was one of the most strange books I've ever read! Then again - Anne Rice is a lil off - anyway over all the book was a really good read. I enjoyed it despite it not being something I would normally pick up!
romeo avatar reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 334 more book reviews
The novel opens up in present-day Paris in a crowded cafe', where David meets Pandora. She is two thousand years old, a Child of the Millennia, the first vampire ever made by the great Marius. David persuades her to tell the story of her life.
Pandora begins, reluctantly at first and then with increasing passion, to recount her mesmerizing tale, which takes us through the ages, from Imperial Rome to eighteenth-century France to twentieth-century Paris and New Orleans. She carries us back to her mortal girlhood in the world of Caesar Augustus, a world chronicled by Ovid and Petronius. This is where Pandora meets and falls in love with the handsome, charismatic, lighthearted, still-mortal Marius. This is the Rome she is forced to flee in fear of assassination by conspirators plotting to take over the city. And we follow her to the exotic port of Antioch, where she is destined to be reunited with Marius, now immortal and haunted by his vampire nature, who will bestow on her the Dark Gift as they set out on the fraught and fantastic adventure of their two turbulent centuries together.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 214 more book reviews
Another great vampire book by Anne Rice!
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on
A compelling story about love, wrapped in Rice's trademark turgid prose. The vampire Pandora details her life, from wealthy Roman woman to Paris sophisticate, and in the process rediscovers her love for Marius, a vampire who has loved her for two thousand years.
The research Rice put into her historical settings is sometimes obvious, but always interesting. The only fully formed character is the narrator. There is a nice contrast between Pandora's thoughtful hedonism and Marius' almost stereotypically brooding vampire.
It's been years since I read Rice's vampire chronicles(and totally missed the last three or four books). I sometimes felt that the narrator was talking about events and characters I should know, but didn't.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 298 more book reviews
There were a few places I got lost in this one but it was easy to backtrack and get on course again..Love Ann Rice...
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 7 more book reviews
Very Good book on the beginings in this series.
mandalovbesbooks avatar reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 2 more book reviews
I read this book awhile ago. I loved it. Anne Rice kept her natural way with the vampire books,but historical it was great. I loved it. I think its a good easy read.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 79 more book reviews
from the back cover...
The title character is a highborn woman of Augustan Rome who later names herself after the Pandora of mythology, opening her own box of surprises. Sitting in a modern-day Paris cafe in the aftermath of a fresh kill, the vampire Pandora accepts the challenge of recounting her history and immediately sets to work, filling the blank pages of an elegant leatherbound notebook...A wealth of narrative twists and period detail.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 41 more book reviews
About a roman era vampire, I would have enjoyed it more if it had been a little longer.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 50 more book reviews
Not bad!
Nightcrawler avatar reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 207 more book reviews
Pandora is portrayed as a very strong and independant woman in this novel, and I suggest this book to woman everywhere.
norma6448 avatar reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 74 more book reviews
pandora wrights her memoirs
justreadingabook avatar reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 1726 more book reviews
Excellent read, she just doesn't seem to write a bad book when it comes to vampires. The rich details and settings make you wish you were there. A great read.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 9 more book reviews
A high born woman of Augustan Rome later names herself after the Pandora of mythology. She has her own box of surprises to open. Sitting in a modern-day cafe in Paris in the aftermath of a fresh kill, the vampire Pandora accepts the challenge of recounting her history and immediately sets to work, filling the blank pages of an elegant leatherbound notebook.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 84 more book reviews
I think this is the best of the Vampire novels by Anne Rice. Its also from a womans point of view and therein lies Anne's strength
LisaBeth0413 avatar reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 59 more book reviews
The title character is a highborn woman of Augustan Rome who later names herself after the Pandora of mythology, opening her box of surprises. Sitting in a modern-day Paris cafe in the aftermath of a fresh kill, the vampire Pandora accepts the challenge of recounting her history and immediately sets to work, filling the blank pages of an elegant leatherbound notebook...
wss4 avatar reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 389 more book reviews
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Anne Rice, creator of the Vampire Lestat, the Mayfair witches, and the fantastic worlds they inhabit, now gives us the first in a series of novels linked together by the fledgling vampire David Talbot, who has set out to become a chronicler. We are in Paris, the time is now. In a crowded cafe, David meets Pandora. She is 2,000 years old, a Child of the Millennia, the first vampire ever made by the great Marius. David persuades her to write for him the story of her life -- from her mortal girlhood in the peaceful Rome of Caesar Augustus through her periolous journey toward the vampire Marius, who will bestow on her the Dark Gift, and through their two centuries together before they are tragically lost to each other.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 51 more book reviews
Great book like all of Anne Rice's are.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 27 more book reviews
Love Anne Rice
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 12 more book reviews
What a writer - this is completely Anne Rice. Enjoy!
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 215 more book reviews
The main character is a highborn woman of Augustan Rome who later names herself after the Pandora of mythlogy, opening her own box of surprises. She is the vampire, Pandora who is recounting her history, filling the blank pages of her journal with a narrative that is a wealth of twists and turns that will keep you enthralled.
heatherleighsss avatar reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on
This is a hardcover book but it has no jacket.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 22 more book reviews
Again I do not care for Anne Rice novels.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 43 more book reviews
An interestic tale from another Vampires perspective but not one of Anne Rices best.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 579 more book reviews
new tales of vampires, i have not read as do not like vampires.
reviewed Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires, Bk 1) on + 34 more book reviews
Rec'd in trade. Worn, small cig burn in cover, does not effect pages/read.

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