Shadow Kiss by Richelle Mead

Title: Shadow Kiss (Vampire Academy #3)

Author: Richelle Mead

Publisher: Razorbill

Release Date: November 13, 2008

Source: Purchased

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Lissa Dragomir is a Moroi princess: a mortal vampire with a rare gift for harnessing the earth’s magic. She must be protected at all times from Strigoi; the fiercest vampires--the ones who never die. The powerful blend of human and vampire blood that flows through Rose Hathaway, Lissa’s best friend, makes her a Dhampir. Rose is dedicated to a dangerous life of protecting Lissa from the Strigoi, who are hell-bent on making Lissa one of them.

Rose knows it is forbidden to love another guardian. Her best friend Lissa--the last Dragomir princess--must always come first. Unfortunately, when it comes to gorgeous Dimitri Belikov, some rules are meant to be broken...

Then a strange darkness begins to grow in Rose’s mind, and ghostly shadows warn of a terrible evil drawing nearer to the Academy’s iron gates. The immortal undead are closing in, and they want vengeance for the lives Rose has stolen. In a heat-stopping battle to rival her worst nightmares, Rose will have to choose between life, love, and the two people who matter most...but will her choice mean that only once can survive?

I love being able to read all the books from a series in a row, I just get so much more into it that way...well, until I run out of the books. I’m so glad I can do this with the Vampire Academy books because they are so amazing, I absolutely loved them. Now that I’m done reading Shadow Kiss, my love for these books has only grown. I don’t even know how to explain what it is about this series but they are really captivating and I never want to put them down (I’m actually forcing myself to write this review instead of starting to read the next one).

It’s time for the senior dhampirs to do their Field Experience, each of them is assigned a Moroi from the Academy to protect during 6 weeks and their performance has a lot to do in determining what happens after graduation. Of course Rose thinks Lissa will be assigned to her but has a shock when she hears that her friend Eddie gets Lissa and she is assigned Christian, Lissa’s boyfriend. Everything seems to be going well for Rose until she starts seeing Mason’s ghost, at this point thing go from bad to worse. A battle on the grounds of the Academy only heats things up that much more and by then end Rose just doesn’t know what to do anymore.

I’m sure by now you guys all know how much I love Rose and how amazing I think she is, so I’ll spare you. I’ll just say that my feelings about her are still the same after having read Shadow Kiss. What I won’t spare you from are my feelings for Dimitri. Oh how I love Dimitri, my love for him has just grown in this book. The way he cares about Rose and treats her just makes me wish sometimes that I was Rose. I loved how in this book he acted more on his feelings. I cannot tell you how happy I was when he and Rose finally gave in to their feelings about each other, it totally made my day. The only thing that made it even better was when he told her he had this whole plan figured out about how they could be together. But of course things just couldn’t be happy and good.

Oh how I wanted things to end well and for Rose and Dimitri to live happily ever after. But of course that didn’t happen, because, really, it never happens. I honestly thought everything was going to work out for them, especially since they both survived the Strigoi attack but the next events just had to go and ruin that. Don’t get me wrong, the story was amazingly good and I had nothing against the ending, I just wished it had ended differently. Despite though little details not being what I wanted them to be, I wouldn’t want the book to end any other way because that would just mean that there wouldn’t necessarily be a point to there being more books in the series. It’s really hard to give the ending away just because it’s so good but at the same time you can’t believe what happened actually happened.

My love for the Vampire Academy books just grows which each installment I read. Shadow Kiss was even better than Vampire Academy and Frostbite and so far is my favorite in the series. But that might just change once I finish reading Blood Promise, which I can’t wait to get more into.