I like alpha males with a hint of vulnerability. Kai is just too clingy for me. I did like the story enough to follow the series and see what happens next. ( )

Seventeen-year-old Alice is a home schooled vampire attending a high school with humans for her senior year when she gets involved with Kai, a good-looking abuse victim. The conflict arises when Max, a vampire hunter also claims to be in love with her. The story ends without resolution to the relationships and an excerpt from book it. ( )

Vampire novesl have been the same story for so long, I don't know why I try to find something different. This book, at least, showed a different side of vampires that was interesting. Born vampires, instead of just created. This young adult novel tried to make a more tame version of the classic Dracula story, but the love triangle that is going on is just...weird. Kai is soooo emo, it almost disgusted me to keep reading. And then, when he was so clingy when Alice is gone, I didn't blame her for what she did. The whole novel tried to show an adult theme, but I think the author was targeting the wrong audience here. ( )

This was another acquisition during my obsession with free books in January.

Again, the writing style and plot development were incredibly poor - I very much understand why this was a self-published effort. It doesn't appear to have ever crossed an editor's desk and it shows. Poor spelling and grammar, one-dimensional characters, and a nonsensical plot make this a very slow read.

The main character is a female teenage "vampire". I use that term because the author did, but it is like no vampirism I have ever seen. There are NO downsides to it, aside from being hunted for no apparent reason. (I think, though my memory is rocky, that at one point she said she didn't even need to drink blood. Really?)

The three main characters are all the same and highly annoying. I struggle to care about what any of them are dealing with, which is good because they make stupid decision after stupid decision for no apparent reason.

Instalove and overly-perfect people abound. Beware.

Another waste of precious reading time.

Format: Kindle
Price Paid: Free
Recommended: No
Value: overpriced at free ( )

*The review is filled with spoilers*
Most of the reviews of this book are almost praising it, but I just have to say that I cannot see where they are coming from. The plot is inconsistent, the characters unlikeable and unbelievable and the sheer writing style is just too simple.
Let's start with the plot. The story centers around Alice, a young vampire who's mother decides to enroll her in the local high school after years of homeschooling. She's "socially awkward" according to the author, but it doesn't seem like it when she interacts with other teenagers. On her first night she goes to a party she was invited to where she meets the alluring Kai Walker (Which she thinks sounds like "skywalker without the s"). He's quiet but intriguing. After a few hours of barely talking and just looking at each other through smoking eyes, they are in love. However, later on in the story she meets Max. The over-the-top friendly bad-boy who wears leather jackets and rides cool cars. From that point on, the story skips a bunch of interesting details, adds a bunch of uninteresting details, and the story is complete with a whole lot of angst and over the top drama supported by strange adjectives and questionable actions. The whole story is over the top and unbelievable. Twilight you could at least still imagine it happening, this however, was just plain ridiculous.
The second problem was the characters. Honestly, Shuler must truly hate her characters because no author with a smidge of respect for her characters would EVER present them the way Shuler did. Alice, Kai, Max, even Alice's mother were all truly unlikeable, unbelievable and just complete drama queens. I wanted at least one of them to die so that I wouldn't have to read about them any more! And when I'm talking about unlikeable characters, I am not saying that the characters are bad people, like Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but characters who one cannot stand reading about because they are not developed properly. There was no depth to the characters, no explanations to their actions, no indication to why they did what they did. In Shelter, the characters did what they did because the author told them to. I wanted to claw my eyes out when reading this because the characters were so boring and unbelievable.

I finished this book because I had to write a review since I got it from the Member Give Away. I did not finish the book because I wanted to, it did not deserve to be fully read. I also cannot care less what happens in book 2. I was in pain from the second page and it just got worse from then on. This was the first book I've read from the Member Give Aways that I've received, and all I have to say is that I really hope none of the other books are anything remotely close to this. Stick to Twilight, it has it's flaws but it will feel like an Oscar Wilde novel after reading this! ( )