Vampire Academy: the Official Illustrated Movie Companion by Brandon T. Snider: Book Review!

Hello, everyone! I'm back with another book review! This time I'm reviewing Vampire Academy:The Official Illustrated Movie Companion by Brandon T. Snider. This is a full comprehensive look at the making of the Vampire Academy movie. But enough about that, let's get onto the review!

I would usually start this review with a decent summary about the book. There isn't a lot to say about this one considering it isn't really a story. This is a book about how the Vampire Academy movie was made. The books touches on the actors, setting, costumes, and the physical training that went into making the movie. It also features full-color, relatively good sized pictures of the movie and what went on behind the scenes. These particular books are interesting to those interested in film making or into cosplaying and hoping to get some decent reference pictures. They're also nice for the die-hard fans of the movies.

Let's start with the positive. I'm impressed with the full page pictures of the costumes that were featured in the movie. For a cosplayer, pictures like these are hard to come by, and they included front, back, and side views of a few of the costumes. It actually showed an in-depth look at some of the costumes that I would like to cosplay.

Another thing that I appreciated about the book was that it looked different than most official movie companions. You can tell immediately that this isn't Twilight or The Hunger Games by the style that the book had. It had a different layout, it focused on different aspects of making the movie, and had a different tone overall.

I also appreciated a few of the actors' interviews. I personally love the cast that was chosen for this movie, and having a few pages in their words was pretty awesome. One I particularly loved was Danila Kozlovsky who plays Dimitri Belikov. The interview comes off slightly humorous and completely heart warming. Of course, I read it with a Russian accent in my mind, so that may have something to do with my love for it.

It's time to get critical. First off, I assume that Snider was on set for a good deal of time and got a good sense of what the movie was about; however, he needs to double check the mythology of a story before stating it as fact. As a reader of the book and movie viewer, I caught the mistake right away. He claims that a dhampir is a half-human half-vampire that willingly donates their blood to the Moroi. That's not true whatsoever. It may be just a "me thing," but the fact that it was so wrong made me so mad.

I also had a problem with the way that the text was formatted. For the most part, the text was legible, but many of the quotes and the interviewer's questions were printed in a color that made it difficult to read. It just seemed like a silly choice or poor editing.

There was another reoccurring problem that I had with the book as a whole. The majority of the book contained interviews. There would be entire pages of just quotes, which would be fine if they were the only quotes in just a chapter. But the interviews took up the entirety of the book. That's like making a story made of just dialogue. That's not a story; that's a play. This isn't a movie companion; this is a book of set interviews, which is nice, but not what I paid for.

Lastly, the entire thing seemed to be a little repetitive. There was a lot of patting each other on the back, and that's fine for the first few pages. It just needs to move forward after that. I just felt like I was reading the same thing over and over again, which made the book harder to read and easier to put down.

With all of that in mind, I'm giving this companion three St. Vladamir's emblems out of five. As much as I appreciated a few qualities about the companion, this companion could have been done so much better.

That's it for now! Comment down below on books that left you feeling a bit disappointed. You can subscribe to the blog by adding your email to the Subscribe Box down below. You can add me to your circles by clicking the Google+ button off to the right. You can also get up to date information about the blog and ridiculousness about my life by following me on twitter @KK_Donna_Blog. Lastly, you can follow the tumblr dedicated to this blog, and you can find it at this link. Read on, lovelies! I'll see y'all next post!