Blood Promise, by Richelle Mead

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This is the 4th installment of the Vampire Academy series, and my favorite volume thus far. Rose Hathaway is inching her way into the Girl Heroine Hall of Fame for me, right next to Katniss Everdeen.

Richelle Mead's writing is fluid, and she's a good plotter. There are some elements of her created world that seemed shoved into place because she needed them to make her plot work---for example, the fact that dhampirs can't have children with other dhampirs. But these are few and are more than made up for by her brilliant plotting and character development. A few of the rules of the vampire world that were off-putting at first turned out to be things that were supposed to be off-putting and get challenged in later volumes. I'm sorry I only have one volume left in this series!
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