Review #22 Hearts At Stake

Hearts At Stake

By Alyxandra Harvey

Publication date: December 22, 2009

My rating: ****1/2

My review:

Solange Drake wants a normal teenage life but when she turns sixteen, she will wake up as a vampire. She is part of an old vampire dynasty and as the first female born into her family in centuries she is also the future vampire queen, if she doesn't get staked first. With the help of her human best friend Lucy, Solange must deal with the changes ahead of her and the dangers from other vampires and from Kieran Black, a vampire hunter looking for revenge.

Hearts At Stake is told in the alternate viewpoints of Solange and Lucy. Solange is already feeling the effects of the blood change as her sixteenth birthday draws near including extreme exhaustion. This makes it difficult to really get to know her as a character. She does have some great fight scenes and she shows moxie when she is not lethargic from the symptoms. Solange is also reluctant to be the leader that the other vampires expect her to be. She detests being smothered by her family, she can’t stand blood, and she hates being the center of attention by all the male vampires eager to court her because of the power she represents and the strong pheremones she unfortunately gives off. As Solange’s best friend, Lucy is also protective but she does her best to give Solange a normal life which sometimes gets both of them in trouble. Lucy may not have any supernatural abilities but she is courageous and not about to back down from a fight. Several times Solange even thinks that Lucy would make a better vampire than she would.

The other main characters are Nicholas Drake, one of Solange’s older brothers, and Kieran Black, a member of Helios-Ra, a vampire hunting organization. Nicholas and Lucy work together to protect Solange while also dealing with their growing attraction to each other. Meanwhile Kieran blames the Drakes for the death of his father but as he gets to know Solange, he comes to care for her. The romance between Nicholas and Lucy sizzles but the relationship between Kieran and Solange is more sedate and less developed by the end of the book. Since this is the first book in a series we will hopefully see more of Solange and Kieran in the next book.

Overall I found this to be an enjoyable and quick read. It is both humorous and romantic but it wasn’t quite what I expected. I did not find it very suspenseful and some of the back story about the different types of vampires was confusing. I couldn’t remember which kinds were allies, etc. Hopefully this will improve with the second book, Blood Feud. I loved the characters of Lucy and Nicholas and much of the snarky humor and romance in the novel revolves around them. I would recommend this to people who enjoyed Beth Fantaskey’s Jessica’s Guide to Dating on the Dark Side or the Blue Bloods series by Melissa de la Cruz.