Shadow Kiss

This is the third novel in the Vampire Academy series.

Victor is going to be put on trial but might get off since he's a royal. Mason shows up, but he might be a ghost.

For the next six weeks Rose and others are going to be involved in some field experience. Rose does not get Lissa to pair with, though, but ends up with Lissa's boyfriend Christian, who Rose doesn't like.

Lissa is going off her meds and could go crazy, and reference is made again to Rose's dark-tinged aura. They also end up at Victor's trial. Things get much worse than that with an attack on the academy itself by the Strigoi.

Later, there's a major fight in a cave, and here is where I have a question, and it relates to history. The Strigoi have taken captives and there are in a cave. The attack starts, and some of the captives are freed. After that, it's mainly a battle of guardians vs. Strigoi, with no “innocents” in the way that could be hurt.

In World War II, in the Pacific Theater, one of the things the Japanese did was build numerous underground fortifications, so strong that virtually no amount of shelling or bombing was able to dstroy them all. In that case, the American soldiers had to attack these caves directly, using regular gunfire, hand grenades and especially flamethrowers. The flamethrowers proved to be extremely effective in burning out the Japanese soldiers.

In this story, there's a cave. The ones the guardians came after to save, the ones left alive, anyhow, have been freed. If some of the guardians had carried flamethrowers, then when a group of Strogoi could be found, the guardians could have used the flamethrowers on them. No chance of the cave collapsing with those, and the Strigoi would go up with a burst of fire. This would have avoided a lot of the hand-to-hand combat with the Strigoi and thus would have reduced the number of guardians killed.

Yet no one even mentions the remotest possibility of using anything but stakes, magical fire and regular fighting.

Just once I'd like to see a story like this where the author thought of using technology to help win the battle, especially in a case like this where the technology doesn't even have to be that terribly advanced and is, in fact, an extension of what a few of the Moroi are doing, and that is using fire magic.

After the dust has settled, so to speak, everything changes for Rose, and she has a whole new lifepath ahead of her, the only question being whether she will survive it or not.

A good third book in the series, and there will be a fourth.



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