Review of Autumn Rose

Synopsis

The highly anticipated sequel to The Dark Heroine: Dinner with a Vampire

Her fate is set in stone…

Autumn Rose lives in a sleepy seaside town in the south-west of England, but buried deep under the surface of her quiet life are dark secrets. Swirling marks on her skin mark her out as having extraordinary power, but at school she is shunned and condemned by the very people she is sworn to protect.

But the appearance of a handsome young man at her school – who has the same curious markings as Autumn Rose – sends her world into turmoil. Plus, there is the fact that Autumn keeps dreaming of a human girl who is about to be seduced by a very dark Prince … and Autumn must figure out how to save her before it is too late.
The exhilarating sequel to The Dark Heroine: Dinner with a Vampire, the incredible online sensation.

Review

This is a review of book 2 in a series but can be read as a standalone as the events in this book occur at the same time as those in book 1. To read my review of Dinner With A Vampire go here - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/414778670?book_show_action=false

I really liked that this book was set during the same time period of the first in the series so as well as a brand new storyline with new characters, we also got to see some key events in the first book from an outsiders perspective. I was expecting Autumn Rose to be more heavily focused on Violet and Kaspar (though looking back I don’t know where I got that idea from) whereas in reality they were mainly just mentioned in passing and then properly appeared only in the final chapters. However even though the book was different to my expectations I still really enjoyed it.

The synopsis makes it sound like the book is set in “our world”. It isn’t. The world that Autumn Rose lives in is a parallel world to ours, similar in many ways but it is inhabited and ruled by magical beings known as Sages. Autumn Rose is a powerful Sage who is the guardian of her high school and struggles with being the only sage.

Overall I liked Autumn but I found her behaviour slightly annoying at times, she is quite self-absorbed and spends a lot of time wallowing in self-pity. I think the problem was that I was expecting this book to be equal in the maturity level to Dinner With A Vampire but instead it all seemed much younger and the characters were much more childish. In the first book all the characters were adults with the maturity that comes with that but Autumn was still just a child. The last book was more NA whereas this was quite firmly YA. Despite this, Autumn did have moments that made me really like her and she developed greatly as a character throughout the book. When we got into the second half of the book Autumn really came into her own and redeemed herself in my eyes.

Fallon on the other hand I really liked from the start. He was such a lovely and caring character but with all the power that comes from being royalty. Personally, I still preferred Kaspar from the first book but Fallon has all the nicer softer elements that Kaspar was lacking.

I still feel that Abigail Gibbs has some growth to do as a writer but this book did show some progression from book 1, though the characters didn’t grab me as much. I preferred Dinner With A Vampire but this book was still very good. It was a great companion to book one and has me really excited for the 3rd book. I highly recommend this book and also the first if you haven’t read that one yet.

*I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review, this has not affected my opinions or rating in any way*

Try it for yourself! Goodreads | Amazon | Amazon UK

Laura