The Rest Falls Away: The Gardella Vampire Chronicles, Book One -- Colleen Gleason

Just before her debut into society, Victoria Gardella Grantworth is informed that she is the latest in a long line of vampire hunters.  She is given the opportunity to refuse the calling, to have her memory wiped, and to live a much less complicated life in relative safety and ignorance -- but she declines.

She accepts her calling, but she does not accept the idea that she will be unable to live and interact in society, to be wooed, to marry.  She, unlike everyone who shares her secret, believes that it will be possible to live a double life.

Okay.  It took me a really, really long time to finish this book.  Normally, I can whip through one of these little mass markets in an afternoon -- but as this one had me stopping every couple of pages to complain to whoever would listen, it took me the better part of a week to get through it. 

I kept going partly because so many people hold it in high regard that I kept waiting for it to get better, partly because I'm stubborn, and partly because I try not to bitch about books I haven't finished.  (I don't always succeed, but I do try.)

In short:  It takes more than descriptions of ballgowns and an excessive use of the word 'betwixt'* for a novel to be evocative of the Regency era.  Lines like this do not help:

"How does one address . . . the master of the vampire executioners?  My lord?  Your grace?  Your Stakeness?"

That belongs in a poorly-written Buffy ripoff, not a Regency era vampire novel.  I had a hard time with the writing from the very first page:

She grasped the bark of the oak, pressing her body into the tree as if it could suck her into safety.

Suck?  Of all the verbs out there, that's the one they (author, editors, etc.) went with?  It just... doesn't work.  'Pull', maybe.  'Envelop'?  Almost anything would have been less jarring, I think.

I could have gotten past the writing if anything else in the book had caught me**, but it didn't.  The characters, the plot, the romance, the magic system, nothing.  At about page 300, I did get curious about how it all would turn out, but even then, if I'd forgotten the book on a bus, I wouldn't have bothered tracking down another copy to finish it.

Needless to say, I was hugely disappointed.

*Three times in the first ten pages, then about once every twenty after that.

**Heck, I adored Twilight.