I like vampire books and I thought the cover of Ascension looked pretty cool. Every author seems to put her own spin on the vampire legend, and the idea of vampires with wings sounded like something that could be really good – or just campy and terrible. In the end, this book fell into neither camp. It has its good moments, but plodding prose and too many cliches made it a rather ordinary series opener.

Therapist Alison Wells leads a rather lonely life. She has powers she’d rather not think about, including great strength that isolates her because she fears inadvertently harming someone if she loses control. She maintains her counseling practice until her world intersects with that of the Guardians of Ascension. This happens as a particularly troubling patient of Alison’s comes for his final appointment. Kerrick, one of the Guardians, has been sent to the same location to clean up after a vampire killing.

To Kerrick’s amazement, Alison can obviously see him despite the supernatural mist over the scene which should block the vampire from human eyes. As events unfold, Kerrick not only notices that Alison shows signs of power held only by those in his world of Ascension, but he also feels an oddly strong attraction to her. He doesn’t want to act on this attraction, but when Alison becomes part of his world, he cannot help being around her and trying to protect her from those who would harm her.

On the plus side, the author creates a very unique and complicated world for her characters in which there is a mortal world, but also a second dimension inhabited by those with special powers who have answered what she calls the “call to ascension”. Within this second dimension, a battle between good and evil unfolds. Essentially, both sides are vampires. However, they are different in appearance, and only the evil (death vamps) partake of the blood of people or of Ascenders at the point of death. Much time is spent on world-building and explaining the various alliances and ruling bodies of the Gurdians’ world. It’s a convoluted world and at times the worldbuilding goes a little slowly, but it is interesting stuff.

If the characters had been equally interesting and complex, this book would have held my interest. The main couple, Kerrick and Alison, definitely have their sources of tension. Kerrick, a widower, has vowed not to settle down with a woman again and Alison isn’t so sure about this whole call to ascension deal. However, instead of deeply exploring these issues or making the characters complex people, readers know from the get-go that Kerrick and Alison will have to be together because they have experienced some kind of magical mating call. This opinion has been expressed before at various places around the Internet, and I’ll agree with it here: Fated mates are a copout. And in this particular case, the reader gets shorted on what could have been some real relationship building. There’s conflict, but many steps of the dance of attraction have already been covered. Add to that leads who basically boil down to a standard issue alpha male and a Special Snowflake heroine (seriously, she’s amazing! She has all kinds of powers and no one in thousands of years of ascension has seen anything like it!), and the book gets a little tedious.

Ascension isn’t a bad book. The worldbuilding is nifty stuff and Roane’s writing is fairly solid. However, the overdone fated mates plot paired with characters who just felt a little meh made this into an everyday paranormal read. I didn’t dislike it, but I can’t recommend it either.