Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead

Lissa Dragomir is a Moroi princess and Rose Hathaway is her best friend. Rose is a dhampir-a half vampire-who has a special mental connection with Lissa and who is training to become a guardian to protect Moroi from the evil Strigoi vampires. When they are brought back to the Vampire Academy after two years of running, they find that nothing much has changed. The royals of the school are still stuck-up and the social scene is still as hard to navigate as before. But soon Rose and Lissa are on top and have almost everything they want. Then someone finds out Lissa's secret. She is different than all of the other Moroi. She can use mental force to manipulate people and she can heal maladies at will. When Lissa's powers are tried, Rose must figure out who is threatening Lissa and give her all to protect the person who means the most to her.

Yet another good vampire book. Really, I don't know what it is about things that suck blood that makes them so interesting, but pretty much every book I've read about vampires has been good. This book has a lot of similarities to the House of Night series. The vampires live during the night, there's forbidden romance, and the characters are rebellious. But there are a few different aspects like the servitude of the dhampirs to the moroi and the feeders that the moroi use to get blood. I found that these different twists were all that was needed to help the story become its own thing entirely. I liked the mystery of the plot and the originality of the characters. I also loved the romance. With vampire books, you're bound to have some kind of romance thing and this book definitely does. My one small complaint was that there were some incidents that occured that weren't really told about. Like there was some car crash that played a big part in the story but it was never fully narrated, it was just hinted at which was kind of maddening. You never got the whole story in that part. But other than that, I think that this book was written very well and explored some new aspects of vampires that I hadn't read about before which was great. I highly recommend this book and I can't wait to read the next book in the series, Frostbite which is due to be out very soon!