Spirit Bound (Vampire Academy #5) by Richelle Mead

Dimitri gave Rose the ultimate choice. But she chose wrong…

After a long and heartbreaking journey to Dimitri’s birthplace in Siberia, Rose Hathaway has finally returned to St. Vladimir’s-and to her best friend, Lissa. It is nearly graduation, and the girls can’t wait for their real lives beyond the Academy’s iron gates to begin. But Rose’s heart still aches for Dimitri, and she knows he’s out there, somewhere.

She failed to kill him when she had the chance. And now her worst fears are about to come true. Dimitri has tasted her blood, and now he is hunting her. And this time he won’t rest until Rose joins him… forever.

 

Rating: 4/5

I’m never quite sure of how I feel about this series. One minute I hate it, the next minute I love it, and on average I’m generally apathetic. I don’t like Rose—I find her to be annoying, and if I met her in real life, I can honestly say that I would have no interest in spending time with her, and I’m fairly certain I’d have a similar reaction around her as the Moroi who turn up their noses with disgust over her antics. Then every now and then she’ll do something or say something that sounds truly awesome, and I’ll decide that maybe she’s ok. This has been the general pattern of each book. Until this one.

The sub-plot at the opening of this book I thought was crazy. I won’t go into details, but this time Rose’s idea of the next course of action was absolutely insane. Even more insane, I’m not sure that it should have worked. In fairness, Mead did a decent job of making the plan sound believable enough, but I just had a difficult time suspending disbelief that much.

Once we were through that sequence of events (around the halfway point of the novel), I started to be more ok with this book. It certainly didn’t annoy me as much as the last one.

The ending sealed the deal, and is the reason this one’s getting so many stars. Let’s just say that I love Abe, and I absolutely and thoroughly respect the scheme he’s been carefully laying throughout this book and the last. It kind of bugs me that Rose is too dense to see it, but I suppose in her situation I might not be thinking too clearly either. And did I mention that I love Abe?

One thing that did kind of bug me was some of the love triangle drama. Since Rose is on this mission to turn Dimitri back into a dhampir even while she’s dating Adrian, there is some obvious romantic tension. I liked how Adrian handled the whole situation, but Rose just bugged me, as usual. There was also a bit of a rebuff from Dimitri that sent Rose sulking, and her solution was to almost have sex with Adrian. I was so pissed off that that’s how such a situation was being handled that I almost stopped reading the book then and there. I mean, yeah, it’s the kind of thing Rose would do, but it was just so frustrating to be dealing with a main character who has that kind of reaction. It ended up working out better than I expected, which is why I didn’t drop the rating.

Overall, this book was mostly a “meh” for me, but I loved the ending (and Abe) so much that I went ahead and gave it 4 stars. And it had such an intense cliff hanger that I’m going to go start the next one right away instead of spacing things out like normal.