Book review: Forever Fifteen

Aug 17

Book Reviews David No Comments
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This blog is primarily focused on technology, but that’s not all of what I’m about. These days I like to read books, so I’m going to share my book reviews via my blog. I’m a member of Goodreads.com, a site which I use as a book manager, and I’m trying to make a habit of reviewing everything I read from now on.

So, without further ado, here’s my first review …

Forever Fifteen Forever Fifteen by Kimberly Steele

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Forever Fifteen is the novel with which I attribute my new found joy of reading. It is also the only novel I have so far read which I have wanted to read a second time.

The book is about a 600+ year old vampire called Lucy (Lucia to be precise) who was abducted and turned during the 14th century, at the age of 15. Forever frozen with the face & body of a fifteen year old, Forever Fifteen. The book is primarily set during the 1980′s, but has frequent flash backs into Lucy’s past as a human and then a new vampire.

One of the things I enjoyed most about this, besides Kimberly Steele’s writing style, is the attention to detail of how a vampire would actually survive in the modern world. This was the first book I came across where vampires can go out in daylight, thus removing the biggest difficulty.

There is of course a love story here too, two in fact. In the flash backs, we see the tempestuous and eventually abusive relationship between Lucy and Sebaastianus, the vampire who turned her. In the 1980′s era, we find Lucy finding possibly the love of her life with school boy John.

There will be inevitable comparisons of this book with the the Twilight books, given the latter’s mainstream success. If I were to draw any comparison between the two, it would be that while the Twilight series is clearly aimed at teenage girls, Forever Fifteen is by no means a book for adolescents. I said above that this book concerns itself with the practicalities a vampire would face, this has to include sex and death, which Forever Fifteen tackles, while Twilight self-censors itself around those topics.

The book does have a satisfying ending, but it is an incomplete story as there are two more books planned. They are as of yet unfinished.

I not only recommend this to fans of the vampire genre, but I would also (and frequently do), recommend this as a first vampire book for anyone interested in the genre.

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