Ascen­sion by Caris Roane is the first book in her Guardians of Ascen­sion para­nor­mal romance series.

Ther­a­pist Ali­son Wells has always had spe­cial pow­ers that make it dif­fi­cult for her to get close to peo­ple with­out hurt­ing them, espe­cially men. What Alli­son doesn’t real­ize is that she’s really an ascen­der, or some­one who’s des­tined to move from this world to Sec­ond Earth (a higher/different dimen­sion) and become a winged vam­pire. But an evil gen­eral who’s try­ing to take over Sec­ond Earth has his sights set on Ali­son and her grow­ing pow­ers, so a winged vam­pire named Ker­rick is assigned to pro­tect Ali­son dur­ing her trans­for­ma­tion or rite of ascen­sion. Ker­rick soon real­izes that Ali­son is his des­tined mate, but after los­ing every­one he’s ever cared about, Ker­rick is deter­mined not to get too close to Alison …

This book is a sort of hybrid in that it’s a mix of fan­tasy and sci­ence fic­tion. There are vam­pires, but they use a fair amount of tech­nol­ogy in the book, and the descrip­tions seemed much more techno than fan­tasy to me. Now, I gen­er­ally don’t like sci­ence fic­tion very much, but I did find some of Roane’s world build­ing inter­est­ing, espe­cially the idea that peo­ple can ascend to higher and higher dimensions/worlds. I also liked the quotes that she used at the begin­ning of each chap­ter — I’ll admit that I’m always a sucker for that sort of thing.

In a lot of ways, this book reminded me of J.R. Ward’s Black Dag­ger Broth­er­hood series, since it has many of the same ele­ments — war­rior vam­pires who drink more than they should, a cou­ple fight­ing against a soul mate bond, evil vam­pires who kill humans. But the char­ac­ters didn’t quite gel for me. Ali­son and Ker­rick are lik­able enough, but I found some of the sec­ondary char­ac­ters much more inter­est­ing. I did enjoy the vil­lain, and the evil gen­eral really steals the book out from under Ali­son and Kerrick.

Over­all, this one was a lit­tle too sci-fi for me, but if you like vam­pires and more sci-fi world build­ing, you might enjoy this book.