REVIEW: Midnight Awakening by Lara Adrian

Mid­night Awak­en­ing by Lara Adrian is book #3 in her Mid­night Breed series, pub­lished 2007 by Dell. It is avail­able in paper­back and ebook at your favorite retailer. Despite the fact that I am essen­tially all para­nor­maled out — I bought this book because a friend of mine loved it.

In the world of vam­pires who coex­ist with humankind, there are cer­tain para­nor­mal ele­ments that are famil­iar to the reader. First, there is the ongo­ing war within the vam­pire uni­verse that is often a cen­turies old bat­tle between good and evil. Sec­ond, this war has sev­eral heroes or war­riors who have their own code of law that defines their soci­ety and exis­tence. Lastly, among these war­riors, you have the soli­tary war­rior and then the bro­ken and dam­aged beyond repair type of war­rior — every­body else is usu­ally a mix­ture between these two extreme males. I could list more ele­ments of this uni­verse but that dis­cus­sion goes beyond the scope of this review.

Tegan is a half-breed Gen One War­rior who is apart of the Order led by Lucan. The Order is an orga­ni­za­tion that elim­i­nates Rogue vam­pires who prey on mankind and other vam­pires. Tegan is a Breed war­rior who is half-human and half-vampire. Tegan is what you would describe as a soli­tary war­rior with a painful past his­tory. He prefers to work alone and has put him­self in social exile. He is sev­eral cen­turies old and apart of the first gen­er­a­tion of Breeds who were born from the Ancients in the four­teenth cen­tury. The Ancients are described as being an off planet alien race who rav­aged humankind with their vio­lence and blood lust. The Ancients ended up fight­ing against the new gen­er­a­tion of Breeds who decided that peace with humans was the way to exist. It is an unpop­u­lar doc­trine that has frac­tured their culture.

The vam­pire soci­ety is now bro­ken into two frac­tions: The Rogues and the Breeds. The Breeds, who run the Order led by Lucan, are not very pop­u­lar within the vam­pire com­mu­nity. Many feel that the Order’s meth­ods on han­dling trou­ble­some vam­pires goes beyond the extreme. There is an agency that polices vam­pires but the Order is viewed more like a vig­i­lante group who spend every sec­ond hunt­ing down Rogue vam­pires and destroy­ing their lairs. I didn’t read the first two books in this series to fully under­stand the social struc­ture but I get the impres­sion that the Dark­haven com­mu­nity is where most vam­pires live apart from humankind.

Breed war­riors have Breed­mates, women who are born genet­i­cally com­pat­i­ble with vam­pires. They all share a dis­tin­guish­able birth­mark that iden­ti­fies them as Breed­mates. They are able to have their chil­dren to carry on the next gen­er­a­tion of Breeds; they are also able to retain their youth­ful good looks and live longer than the aver­age human from Breed blood. The most sacred union for Breed­mates is the blood bond. When both male and female drink from each other, this act solid­i­fies their rela­tion­ship, mak­ing it whole and complete.

Elise Chase is a for­mer Dark­haven res­i­dent slash Breed­mate who has decided to live apart from the vam­pire com­mu­nity. Life has dealt her a few blows mak­ing her a widow for five years and then mak­ing her son a casu­alty of war against the Rogues. For the past three or four months she has been hunt­ing down Min­ions (human ser­vants who serve their Rogue mas­ters) in revenge of her son’s death. One night, Tegan saves her from being attacked by sev­eral Rogues. He fig­ures out her plan and tries to dis­suade her with no success.

Elise has a weak­ness and a lia­bil­ity against her in that she is able to read people’s thoughts. Usu­ally the chat­ter is indis­tin­guish­able noise that is con­sum­ing and full of hate and vicious com­men­tary that goes on non-stop. It is so bad that she has bad migraines from them, mak­ing her weak and dis­abled. Elise asks Tegan to help her con­trol her gift so that she can be use­ful to the Order in their war but Tegan rebuffs her help, stat­ing that her moti­va­tion is dri­ven only by pain and grief.

How­ever, Elise man­ages to help the Order any­way by inter­cept­ing a pack­age from a Min­ion courier that con­tains a jour­nal of infor­ma­tion that could very well lead to the down­fall of mankind as we know it. Tegan and Elise bounce from Boston to Berlin on a fact find­ing mis­sion and man­age to lead trou­ble to them there as well. How­ever, they are allowed a brief period of time to develop their rela­tion­ship and act upon their attrac­tion. Most of their con­flicts were inter­nal vs. exter­nal in nature.

The Rogues leader, Marek, is Lucan’s brother and that dynamic was inter­est­ing on it’s face but there wasn’t much to it beyond the sur­face. I really liked Elise’s char­ac­ter because despite her dis­abil­ity, she copes as best she can out­side the Breed com­mu­nity, choos­ing to suf­fer among humans to achieve her goal. She is stub­born and strong. She even tol­er­ated Tegan’s mood swings with aplomb. Hon­estly, I didn’t really like Tegan until the very end of the book. I felt he was often too harsh and cold. It annoyed me to no end when­ever he referred to Elise as “the female.”

The romance was the weak­est part of the novel for me. Yes, Tegan had to deal with a tragic past but it wasn’t until he felt that Elise was lost to him that he allowed him­self to fully open his heart. It wasn’t until he real­ized that he couldn’t stand other men being around her that he allowed him­self to con­cede that he might need her and want her for him­self. He had a few redeem­ing qual­i­ties in that he taught Elise to con­trol her gift and was weak with fear for her safety. It really is too bad that his gen­tle side didn’t fully show up until the very end of the book.

As for the world build­ing, it is pretty solid. There are the usual social cus­toms and class struc­ture within the vam­pire com­mu­nity that you would expect. The impro­pri­ety of accept­ing Breed blood with­out a com­mit­ment is frowned upon and was a major inter­nal con­flict fac­ing the cou­ple. The Breed war­riors do have a weak­ness in that first gen­er­a­tion vam­pires must hide from sun­light. The usual heavy artillery and weaponry that make up the attire of the War­riors was in full dis­play here. As was the over the top heroic actions of the men in mak­ing every­thing go “boom.”

The enemy was devel­oped enough to keep me engaged and inter­ested in the plot. The fact that there is a drug cre­ated for the sole pur­pose of mak­ing Breeds into Rogues was just too easy. But then some Breed vam­pires come close to blood lust — often tee­ter­ing on the age of turn­ing Rogue. Another thing that stood out was the der­maglyphs that marked each Breed war­rior, mak­ing their skin a human mood ring. That was cool. Some Breeds as well as their Breed­mates have spe­cial skills or pow­ers. Thus far I’ve encoun­tered char­ac­ters with telepa­thy, pychom­e­try among other things and in the next book, some­one can see the dead.

Mid­night Awak­en­ing wasn’t bad but it lacked that “umph” to make it a keeper for me. While many of the ele­ments that the author uses to cre­ate her world is solid and sound, a lot of it felt famil­iar and that’s not always a bad thing. But I know for me, I am usu­ally bored with the pre­dictable and famil­iar. The story had a few slow spots, some inter­est­ing world build­ing and engag­ing char­ac­ters. I plan to read the fourth book,Mid­night Ris­ing , that’s due out today. B. Elise’s char­ac­ter is what ele­vated this book for me.