I grabbed K.C. Blake’s Vampires Rule off of Amazon’s KDP recently, only to discover that I had already ‘purchased’ it from Smashwords at some point in the past. Guess the synopsis really appealed to me if I thought to download it twice. (Note: as I wrote this I noticed that it is currently free on both sites.)

Description from Goodreads:
They don’t call him Jackpot for nothing.

Jack has always beat the odds… at least until now. When he was attacked by a werewolf, vampires saved him. When he got tired of living the vampire life, another werewolf attack freed him, making him human again. Now Jack just wants to live a normal life, but what’s normal about a hunter girlfriend, a brother who wants to stake him to be on the safe side, and a head werewolf building an army to rule the world?

Review (with some spoilers):
I’m having a little trouble writing this review. Not because I don’t know what I want to say, but because I don’t want to write the exact same review 15 other people already have. The truth is, however, that just like a number of previous readers, I found the idea of this story fascinating but the execution lacking. Jack, Silver, and Jersey’s destiny was an interesting one, but there were a number of plot holes and a couple just curiosity holes. For example, they have to fight the head werewolf, so what about the head vampire that was created at the same time as him? He’s never mentioned. Surely he was important at some point.

I thought that the characters were a little flat and I greatly disliked the way that Silver was constantly treated as a child. She had trained her WHOLE life to be a werewolf hunter. Jack had just been introduced to the art. But everyone was willing to let him take the lead and all of the risks. Why? Was she really so weak? If so, how had she survived so long without him? I mean she’s part of the prophecy (or whatever) too. It smacked of paternalistic sexism…have to protect the precious, fragile female at all cost. Oh god, just gag me.

I did really appreciate Jersey Clifford in all of his poetry spewing badness. He felt like he had more depth than all of the other character combined. Cowboy and Lily had a lot of potential too. Similarly the interaction between Jack and his brother was thought provoking. Billy’s experience surely had to be the hardest of any other character. He deserves some credit.

It was hard to reconcile the ‘we have to save the world’ plot line with the ‘innocent love’ storyline. I suppose if I was 15 and didn’t know how much more life had to offer I might be able to relate to the importance of being a couple (holding hands, carrying her books, etc). But as an adult I found the whole thing too…too vanilla. Granted, I am an adult and this is a YA book (and I’d expect it to best appeal to the lower age brackets of the genre). But even if I could get excited about it, I have a hard time believing two people tasked with such a heavy destiny would stop in the middle of it to cuddle and declare their undying love. Not the time people.

My final and extremely inelegant say on the matter is that the book was alright and will likely appeal to Twilight‘s younger fan base.