The Book Nympho: REVIEW + GIVEAWAY: Dante's Diary: Vampire Lore and More

Dante's Diary: Vampire Lore and More
by Andrea Dean Van Scoyoc
Published June 10th 2011 by Sunbury Press, Inc.

RATING: ★★1/2

Ivana Morriander has lived life to its fullest. She has seen and done things that most people could only imagine doing. To the unsuspecting person she is beautiful, smart and taking each day by the hand to enjoy all it has to offer.

But, "life," when describing Ivana, is an interesting oxymoron; Ivana is not alive and hasn't been for a very long time. A woman with everything, she freely mingles with humans - as one of them - and enjoys their company, preferring to leave what she is and the baleful tale of how she came to be, within the pages of her beloved diary.

One of the few humans to know what Ivana actually is, Dante Compegna, her best friend, chronicles this amazing woman's journey through life, in the form of matching diary entries, based on Ivana's own records. It is within those pages that he learns the true secret of his friend's existence ... and the real story of the oftentimes sad and lonely tragedy of what it means to be one of the living dead ... But it is within those same pages that he is suddenly privy to a mind-numbing discovery and the shocking truth about himself and his family when he realizes that meeting Ivana may not have simply been coincidence ... after all!

REVIEW:

I received Dante’s Dairy from the author for a review. It took me a few months to actually pick it up to read and then it took me about a month to read it. I just couldn’t get into the proper mood to read it.

The overall story was interesting but how it was told through a diary set up has you jumping around in Ivana’s life during different times. The POV changed from Dante telling Ivana’s story through what he had personally seen and what he had read in her diary then it would switch to Ivana telling her story through present time and her memories of older parts of her life.

Some of the present day (1980s) entries read like “old” times. I had to keep looking at the dates to make sure they were set in modern times.

Dante’s Dairy was slow paced for most of the book and the vampires are not the romantic type that you see in most books. They are downright scary and gory, at least in their feeding habits. No nice little bites here and sip, sip there. Their prey doesn't walk away without a memory of being someone’s meal. They don’t walk away period! And blood was not the only thing the vamps ate. (Brains) But it was a nice change to see them as the monsters that old myths pictured them to be.

I had a really hard time with the rating on this book. The plot is a 3 but the way the author chose to tell the story (diary style) is more like a 1 so I split the difference and gave it a 2 1/2.

If you want to experience a different type of vampire story then try out Dante’s Dairy.