Kiss Me Forever
By
Grade : B

Dixie LePage is at an all-time low. Her engagement has just ended, and she leaves her job as a school librarian to travel to Bringham, a village in southern England, to collect an inheritance left to her by two maiden aunts that she never met. The inheritance includes a substantial sum of money, along with a run-down, dirty house full of old books and weird artifacts. En route to her destination, she finds that some of her personal belongings have been stolen, leaving her without money or information about the people she needs to contact once she arrives in town.

Despite the inauspicious start to her travels, once she reaches Bringham, things begin to look up when Dixie meets handsome Christopher Marlowe for the first time. Unlike the other men in Bringham, whose advances she is constantly forced to rebuff, Kit is genteel and respectful, and southern belle Dixie finds herself drawn to him. She soon realizes that nothing in Bringham is exactly as it seems, and she finds her belief in the paranormal challenged by the denizens of this strange little community, which includes a coven of witches who are at war with the local vampires—including Christopher, her new love interest.

Dixie is your typical Southern-lady romance heroine: tough as nails on the outside, but with a tender, loving heart. When she takes charge of a situation, she really takes charge and persists until the problem is solved. She isn’t going to give herself to just any man, and Christopher has to win her heart gradually. She demands honesty from the people in her life, and isn’t willing to settle for less than she deserves. Christopher is your standard ideal vampire-man—handsome, genteel, and just a little bit old-fashioned. There are a couple of nasty villains, including a lawyer-warlock who is after Dixie for her body and for some old papers her aunts reportedly left somewhere in the house.

The first novel of a paranormal romance series often contains a lot of information about the world being presented. Laurey manages to work the details of vampire life into the plot, and her technique is generally effective - there are no large info-dumps mucking up the action. It helps that Dixie is new to the idea of vampires, and since she’s fallen for one, she needs to learn a thing or two about their ways. The conflict between the vampires and the witches is nicely handled, and it’s always exciting to have a heroine who is capable of saving the day. There are some exciting plot twists throughout the novel, and while some of them are predictable if you’ve read enough vampire romances, the writing and the characters are good enough to make the predictability forgivable. Many of the secondary characters in the vampire world are heroes or heroines of later novels in the series, and several of them, like Christopher Marlowe in this novel, are based on historical characters.

I often have a difficult time finding vampire romance novels to recommend to adults who enjoy Stephenie Meyer’s ever-popular Twilight series. While Kiss Me Forever isn’t an exact read-alike, there are some similar elements: handsome, idealized hero; conflict about whether the heroine should become a vampire; a little bit of a love triangle. This novel is certainly racier than Twilight, but it’s also written with adults in mind. However, the love scenes are mild, and much of the action happens behind closed doors. Dixie has more of a backbone than Twilight’s Bella Swan, and there’s a lot more humor in Laurey’s world. Re-issuing this novel was a good idea on the publisher’s part, and I hope that it finds the audience it deserves this time around.

Reviewed by Nanette Donahue
Grade : B

Sensuality: Warm

Review Date : October 16, 2010

Publication Date: 2010

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Nanette Donahue

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