The Twelve Books of Christmas: Day 12

Yay we made it! Merry Christmas (Eve)! I hope you all get everything you want in your stockings and presents! I'll be going off on holiday in January, so the blog might be going slow, but I have a few posts queued to keep things going. Hope everyone has a great time during holidays :)
Now, for our last Book of Christmas...

Day 12:
Vampire Academy, Richelle Mead

I talked about Mead's Storm Born a few days ago, so of course I had to talk about my favourite of her series - and the one that sparked my love for all things Richelle Mead.
The word 'vampire' carries a lot of baggage ever since Twilight, but trust me when I say, this is not Twilight, and Rose points and laughs at the types of Bella. Think of it more as a cross between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Harry Potter.
Rose Hathaway is a dhampir - the child of a Moroi vampire and another dhampir (or a human, both unions end in dhampirs. Originally, dhampirs came from vamps/humans, so they're essentially half vampires), and she's training to be a Guardian for her best friend, the Royal Moroi Princess Lissa Dragomir.
The cool thing about Vampire Academy is that it incorporates real Scandinavian vampire myths into the novel; their folk tales told of two different kinds of vampires: the live Moroi that could control the elements (air, earth, water, fire and spirit), and the undead vampires, the Strigoi, who were basically manic beings whose main purpose in death was to kill all the Moroi and destroy civilisation. Yay!
As a Guardian, it's Rose's job to train to kill Strigoi. And she's good at it. Especially because she has an uber special instructor: what me and my friends lovingly call 'the badass Russian god', aka Dimitri.
Rose is a hilarious narrator, and it was always an absolute pleasure to be in her crazy head; it's one of the things I miss the most in the spin-off series, Bloodlines. With Rose around, there's never a dull moment.