Flora's Musings...: Flora Reviews... Wake Me When the Sun Goes Down by Lisa Olsen

Wake Me When the Sun Goes Down (Forged Bloodlines #1)

by Lisa Olsen

Read: 7^th – 10^th September 2015

Format: Kindle

My Goodreads Rating: 4 Stars

...So what’s this book about?

This book is the first in Lisa Olsen’s Forged Bloodlines Series (I see it’s got 9 other books listed in the series as I write this) and is a vampire paranormal romance novel of about 264 pages which I downloaded from Amazon UK for free. (I do luuuv a bargain!)

The blurb says;

It was ironic that this happened to me; I was never a night person at heart. So you can see right off the bat why a vampire was the very last thing I would have chosen to be.

Anja Evans wakes up in the morgue with a hell of a hangover. It takes almost eating her best friend before she figures out... she's a vampire. When a dark and dangerous vampire shows up at her door asking to see her license and registration, Anja assumes Bishop is a regular cop. But breeding among vampires is strictly controlled, and her unlicensed status makes her an enemy of The Order. Struggling to find a balance between her former life and her undead one, Anja tries to blend school and living up to her new identity, all while searching to find the elusive Viking, whose blood gave Anja the strength of a vampire hundreds of years old.

This might also be found in the new adult section, not that “adult” because we find our main character, Anja, 3 years out of high school attending The Central Coast Academy of Fine Arts.

...So, what did I like about it?

I haven’t read anything by Ms Olsen before; I found her writing style easy to read and I was impressed at how quickly she managed to submerge me into her world.

All of the characters we met were complex and multi dimensional and I found them all to be very believable.

I liked that Ms Olsen wrote her male main character, Bishop, as an alpha who wasn’t tortured about feeding and/or killing humans (“Anja, that’s part of our nature. We’re killers, it’s what we’re built for”; it’s a refreshing change in a paranormal romance story.

I found my chuckles came when Anya’s best friend Bridge or Bishops’s friend Mason were in the scenes.

I liked Anya very real mix of intelligence, strength and naiveté and I found myself pleasantly gripped with her tale; wondering who her sire was and what she would do if she had to abandon her “human” life.

...So, ummm, was there anything I disliked about it?

Not really, just small niggles that took the edge off.

Of course I wished that the ending hadn't been a cliff-hanger because, well, it’s frustrating, but I’m sort of ok with that because it’s more of a soft one rather than “oh no Anya’s plummeting to her death will she survive the 1000ft drop to the bottom of the ravine??” type hanger more just lots of questions left unanswered.

I must confess to finding Anja’s behaviour and thought process a bit annoying at times but as I’ve said in other reviews, that’s just because I have no patience for teenage style romantic angst.

...So, basically what I’m saying is...

I really enjoyed this book, perhaps more than I was expecting due to my aversion of young adult/new adult main characters.

I’d recommend this book if you like reading paranormal stories based in our contemporary world where the main character has to come to terms with a new ability/lifestyle, where the relationship/romance/sexual tension part is very real to life (I don’t jump into the sack immediately – I luuv the anticipation and build up though) and all without stereotypical pnr characters!