“Well I suppose we better look the little criminal up.”

62. Spirit Bound – Richelle Mead

Trials! Graduation! Jailbreak! Vegas! Death Watch! College visit! Rescue mission! What? In some respects, it feels like everything but the kitchen sink is being thrown at the wall in this penultimate book of the Vampire Academy series. It’s like once the main characters graduated from the academy and were sort of technically on their way to their prescribed destiny at court, instead they went super haywire. Rose is all over the place, finding out the new ways she can be punished as an adult, including shoveling dirt and super-intense heartbreak.

And as much as the focus of this book is on the possibility of curing a Strigoi, one in particular, when that potential cure is being put into action, it’s very rushed as to whether or not Lissa actually learned how to do the charm or not. She never got the chance to learn it from the dude that did it before, she can barely charm a ring at the beginning but gets exponentially better all of a sudden to the point where she can disguise her and Rose as humans, and as much as I like Dmitri, his actions as a Strigoi are the main thing in the book that make sense. His post-Strigoi actions do not really make as much sense, but they do put Rose into an Empire Strikes Back kind of super-depression right before she gets accused of murder. Guess she should be glad she didn’t lose a hand and she is just developing her relationship with her dad, who wears cool scarves.

Murderface plows ahead through the blankets with Pickles on her heels. They will get to the bottom of this blanket and resolve all these plot threads.