55 pages • 1 hour read
Richelle MeadVampire Academy
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Series Context: Vampire Academy
Written by American author Richelle Mead, Vampire Academy is a young adult paranormal romance and stands as the first in a six-book series of the same name. The series follows best friends Rose Hathaway and Lissa Dragomir as they navigate a variety of challenges. Rose is a half-vampire, or dhampir, who is learning to protect Lissa Dragomir, a full-vampire Moroi princess. The two girls are bound by a psychic link that they will later learn is a result of Lissa’s rare “spirit” powers. As the series unfolds, Rose will eventually deepen her relationship with her mentor, Dimitri Belikov. Their relationship is initially forbidden due to their age difference, but they will eventually overcome this obstacle and become a couple by the end of the series. Lissa eventually learns that she can “heal” Strigoi, turning them back to their previous forms, and she will eventually take the Moroi throne as her community’s queen.
Vampire Academy (2007) is followed by Frostbite (2008), Shadow Kiss (2008), Blood Promise (2009), Spirit Bound (2010), and Last Sacrifice (2010). Beginning with Shadow Kiss, the later books in the series each hit the New York Times Bestseller List.
Mead also wrote a spin-off series called Bloodlines, which follows several characters introduced in the later Vampire Academy books. This series follows Sydney Sage, an Alchemist who is introduced in Blood Promise, and Adrian Ivashkov, a Moroi who is introduced in Frostbite and serves as a brief love interest for Rose. Characters from the Vampire Academy series make regular appearances in the Bloodlines series, which consists of six novels that were published from 2011 to 2015.
The Vampire Academy series has also been adapted into several forms. In 2014, it was released as a film starring Zoey Deutch, though it received poor reviews and was a financial failure. In 2022, the streaming service Peacock aired a television adaptation that was cancelled after one season. Graphic novel adaptations of the first two novels were released in 2011 (Vampire Academy) and 2012 (Frostbite), but the remainder of the series was not adapted into graphic format.
Genre Context: YA Vampire Novels
Vampires have been a staple in literature since Bram Stoker’s 1897 epistolary novel Dracula made the titular villain a shorthand for vampire stories everywhere. Yet the first two decades of the 21st century saw a particular boom in young adult novels with vampires as central characters, most commonly with the vampires as love interests rather than villains. Notable works include Annette Curtis Klause’s The Silver Kiss (1990) and L.J. Smith’s The Vampire Diaries (1991), which would later become a long-running television series of the same name. However, arguably the most well-known example is Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series, the first novel of which was published in 2005. Both the Twilight books and the movies they inspired became wildly popular and had a tangible effect on the popularity of YA vampire novels in general. Following Meyer’s massive financial success, vampire novels dominated the scene. For example, Melissa De la Cruz released her Blue Bloods series in 2006, and Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy series was published in 2007. Additionally, Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instruments series ran from 2007 to 2014.
Although the prevalence of vampires in YA literature waned within a decade of Meyer’s debut, they did not disappear from the genre entirely. More recent publications focus on more nuanced social issues, such as Renée Ahdieh’s 2019 The Beautiful, which takes place in 19th-century New Orleans and focuses on the intersection of race and gender in the city’s high society. Scholars have debated the different reasons for the popularity of vampire-themed YA literature, positing that the ageless protagonists provide a soothing contrast to the tumultuous uncertainty of adolescence. These debates continue, but the publishing history has established that even though the popularity of vampire novels in YA literature may wax and wane, the presence of this subgenre will continue to endure.
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By Richelle Mead
