I would, however, like to review this book for men.

After all, what man wouldn’t like a book about Vampires, right?

This book is so utterly devoid of anything that a man would find interesting that it might actually be impossible to write something more polarizing between the two genders than what Stephanie Meyer has managed to create.

She does a decent job of making a man think that it might finally become interesting at some point. She starts out with vampires. She introduces a legend of werewolves who are not friendly at all towards vampires. She displays brief flashes of vampiric powers (modified quite extensively to fit into a love story). She introduces a powerful and evil vampire as the nemesis. She builds up to a climax where the good vampire is going to have to defeat the evil vampire to rescue the damsel in distress.

Well, it does happen, but we don’t actually get the action shown to us in the book because the main character, through whose eyes we are witnessing the action in the book, is actually unconscious for the final battle.

She wakes up and hears that it has happened. And that’s when we find out that we are going to get absolutely NO action in this book.

Is there any mystery or intrigue?

Not really. It’s pretty easy to guess what is going to happen, except for the part that there isn’t actually a climax that is written down in the book. I didn’t see that coming.

What does it have then?

Teenagers feeling out a relationship with a lot of dialog, most of it very similar to what we hear from our own teenage daughters. This isn’t Harry Potter. It would be more akin to High School Musical with quasi-vampires and no songs. Or maybe the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants with quasi-vampires.

What self-respecting man would want to read a book about teenage conversations and relationships and no actually interesting plot points or action?

None, I would guess.

It has to be, doesn’t it? They’ve added in the action that had been so callously removed by the author, but I have to think that we’ve seen all of the action in the trailers. What’s left is most likely all of the silliness of high school adolescents that we would probably much rather avoid anyway.

Author’s Note: Thanks to all of those who noticed the typo. It has been fixed. It is certainly refreshing that some readers today can still spot a typo when they see it.

With so many high hopes for a science fiction vampire novel, I was pretty much setting myself up for a fall. I was hoping for too much from a self-published novel. Right?

To set the scene, Antonia, the heroine of the story, is marooned on a planet where she happens to help the right stranger and in short order, finds herself with an officer’s commission in Star Command. While in Star Command she finds that things aboard her ship and throughout Star Command are not as they should be. There are various plots afoot, and she finds herself in the unique position of being able to fix these problems and thwart these plots. She is in this position because, one, she is a a Star Command officer, and because, two, she is a vampire.

The beginning of the story had me a little bit confused. That isn’t to say that the beginning was boring in any way, but there were a couple of times when I wondered if I had picked the book back up at the right page because what I was currently reading bore very little similarity to what I had previously been reading. Apparently T.M. Moore decided that only certain parts of her pre-Star Command history were important because there were some pretty sizable gaps in Antonia’s story in the first hundred pages. In retrospect, the beginning made perfect sense, and her choices on what to tell and what not to tell were probably good ones. They just confused me at the time. As the story unfolds, the beginning becomes perfectly clear.

Well, maybe not perfectly clear, but I hear that the second book clears up a few of the questions that I am still pondering.

This story as a whole was riveting, and I have to admit that most of the twists in the story completely blind-sided me. I thought that I was reading a simple Sci-Fi vampire book with Antonia out to right a few little wrongs in space. Little did I know that T.M. Moore was a little bit more ambitious that I had first thought. She suckered me into it. I honestly didn’t see it coming. I wish I could tell you more, but I refuse to ruin it for you. Suffice it to say, that you will not be disappointed.

I’ve read some pretty good vampire novels from Anne Rice and Barbara Hambly, among others, but this innovative retelling of the popular (and often stale) vampire genre blew me away. It was better than any of those. It was better than I hoped it could be. I can’t wait to get my hands on the second book. Get a copy of Destiny’s Forge for yourself today.