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Book Review of The Greyfriar (Vampire Empire, Bk 1)

The Greyfriar (Vampire Empire, Bk 1)
mreneerouser avatar reviewed on + 127 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 10


I finished the book and I hugged it. Yup, Im gonna admit it. I hugged the book. It was THAT good. You are going to have many reviews for this book that will do an awesome job of detailing what the book is about and they will do a much better job of explaining the story. Therefore, I am going to do a funky bullet point list of what I loved about this book and what I did not like.
What I loved about this book:

The characters- The book is full of them. These are not your superficial Ill-put-you-in-to-take-up-pages characters but characters with meaning and a story behind each one. You have Princess Adele, the main character of the story. In addition to Adele, you have (and this is just a few of them) Greyfriar (but who is he really?), Clark- the American War Hero (again- who is he really?), Colonel Anhalt (I loved him- he is so sweet), Lord Kelvin (I think he will be big in book 2), Mamoru (such an interesting character), Selkirk, Simon and one of my favorite characters Flay. The characters are so well written, I was never confused. Trust me, that is saying plenty!

The combining of genres- The book combines horror, romance, action, adventure, politics, war, steampunk, and satire with such ease that you dont even realize you are reading a book outside your comfort zone because it blends so perfectly.

The imagery- holy cow can the authors write (can you tell I cant!). The best I can do is give you an example-

Adele saw dark mounds scattered on the avenues, streets, and alleys. A closer examination revealed that the mounds were piles of dead bodies. The citys wide circles and narrow courtyards were heaped with bones. The turgid river Thames was at low tide and, as the airship skimmed over it, Adele saw white femurs and rib cages protruding from the muck along the shoreline. Nearly all the glass windows in the city were smashed, except amazingly, some of the stained glass of.

The vampires- These vampires are not your typical vampires. It would be easy to say they are vile, horrific, simplistic creatures that either destroyed or imprisoned most of the humans in the Great Killing of 1870 but that would be far from the truth. I cannot really explain the vampires since one of the rewards of reading the story is learning about the vampires as Adele does. Not everything is what it seems.

Ok, so I am going to stop now since as the top line states I am rambling. I forgot to write about what I did not like about the book. It ended.

Definitely my favorite book of 2010. A 6 star out of 5 (yup, I just wrote 6 out of 5).