Shadow Kiss

*****

5 Stars/5

Rose Hathaway is close to graduating and becoming her best friends Lissa’s Guardian. All she has left to do is complete her field experience, where she has to protect Moroi from fake attacks. However, after the tragic events that happened over the winter Rose has been acting erratically, having dark, depressing thoughts and now she thinks she is seeing the ghost of Mason, the friend who died at the hands of a Strigoi. At the same time, she and Dimitri have to protect Lissa whilst struggling against their forbidden feelings for each other. As they are student and teacher, in the world of Moroi and Dhampir, two Dhampir’s should not be together as the Moroi “always come first”. At the same time a group of royals seem to be gathering together which seems to be leading to students getting injured but Rose cannot understand why the royal Moroi would want to harm each other.

Shadow Kiss is the third, and my favourite, book in Vampire Academy series, as the story is interesting, there is more action, tension and the romance is amazing and yet at the same time horrible (I cannot say more without giving away spoilers). I like the politics in this book and how the different races and classes look at now the Moroi should be protected and I can see this being an important plot in a later book.

Rose is much more unstable in this book, and has lost her confidence from the first 2 books since the events of Frostbite, but I felt this added more depth to her character and has shown how much she has changed. Whilst I can relate to Lissa more than Rose, I felt that she was very self-absorbed in this book and does not appreciate her friendship with Rose as much as Rose does with her. I liked how we got to know Christian better in this book as while he is still sarcastic we can also see how strong and loyal he is.

Shadow Kiss ends on a VERY big cliff-hanger and I suggest that you have a copy of Blood Promise next to you when you finish this book as you will not want to wait to see what happens next to Rose and everyone else. I would recommend Shadow Kiss to fans of the first 2 books.