5/5/13: I. FINISHED. OMFG. I CAN'T BELIEVE I READ THE WHOLE BOOK.I deserve a medal because I thought I was going to throw it a long time ago.Full review coming whenever I can get coherent thoughts together..______I don’t even know where to start with The Dark Heroine (Dinner With a Vampire). I received this book after winning it through Early Reviewers at LibraryThing so I admit to feeling a bit obligated to at least reading it. After all, I requested it. I had some hope that it would be alright. The premise at least interested me to an extent, and I had avoided reviews so I had no idea what I was going into when I picked it up. Let’s just say before writing this, I had to take a few days to calm myself down so that my review wouldn’t be filled with anger and rant-fueled hate for the book. I’m surprised I made it through the entire book. I trudged my way through. It took me three weeks to finish this book because every single time I picked it up, I could barely read twenty pages without setting it back down from having the feeling of wanting to vomit. And this is putting it nicely, folks.The characters are absolutely disgraceful. I’m still angry at them. Gibbs presented a potentially good idea and poorly executed it with this cast of characters and their actions and manners that left me fuming before I even reached the halfway point. Abuse. Attempted rape on more than one occasion. Slut shaming constantly. Personality changes that didn’t make sense at all. And a confusing storyline that jumped all over the place with holes everywhere. My head spun so much. Not to mention the term GIRLY so overused that I lost count within the first thirty pages (15 times there alone, so you can just imagine how much in 540 pages) and left such a sour taste in my mouth. Girly? Really? That just makes it creepy. Not endearing. And how Violet, or any woman for that matter, could be “attracted” to a guy that is consistently threatening, belittling, abusing, and controlling them is beyond me. THAT IS NOT ROMANTIC. I don’t care if the character is a vampire. It’s. Not. Okay. The only thing I liked a bit was the dual PoV. Sometimes it helped ease the confusion of the plot--though, sometimes it made it worse. Often I felt like things were just made up as they went along and that’s why I’d sit there like, “huh?” I’d even find myself flipping back a few pages to re-read just to make sure I didn’t accidentally skim over something. That was an annoyance. Glad that’s over now.
