Die for Me by Amy Plum

Publisher’s summary: My life had always been blissfully, wonderfully normal. But it only took one moment to change everything.

Suddenly, my sister, Georgia, and I were moving to Paris to live with my grandparents. And I knew my life would never feel normal again. Then I met Vincent.

Mysterious, sexy, and unnervingly charming, he put me in danger of losing my heart all over again. But I was ready to let it happen . . . until I realized that Vincent Delacroix is no normal human—that he has a terrifying destiny and enemies who are determined to destroy him and all of his kind.

Can I risk everything for love?

My take: I’m totally on the fence about how I feel about this one. I can’t say that I didn’t like this book because I did like it. But the negatives stand out in my mind way more than any of the positives, and I’m left here wondering if I just had high expectations for this book that were not met. But, even then, I don’t think that my opinions about these specific negative aspects would change.

Die for Me starts off quite depressing and I wasn’t sure I could keep pushing through it. It was a real mood spoiler for me. I felt really bad for Kate (main character) because of how her world had completely changed inside out. Not only did she lose her parents but she moved to another country. And it really hit me hard when she severs all ties and communication with everyone and everything from her life before her parent’s death.

Well, of course; it’s only after Kate crosses paths with a boy named Vincent where the story starts to really get interesting. And it immediately started me thinking, “Who and what is Vincent?” “Who are the people with Vincent, and what do they do?” “Are they bad or good?” Just when I thought I knew who to trust, there’s a betrayal, and I was a little shocked that the other characters in the book were quick to see it as not really being a betrayal. They were quick to decide that the character doing the betraying was simply being tricked, or used or confused. I won’t say where their conclusion led, but I still found the whole situation weird.

I’d like to talk about the paranormal aspect of Die for Me, but there isn’t much I can say because I want to prevent spoilers. But I will say that, in a sense, this book is “kind of” a zombie book. And I say “kind of” because Amy Plum’s zombies are quite different from typical zombies, and I don’t know how you could really put them in any other paranormal category. When I first heard about this book, I was actually hoping for something at least a little closer to typical zombies.

Anyways, as always, I like to talk about the romance in the books I review. The romance in this book (at times) was really sweet, but at other times I found it to be a little cheesy and even more often I thought it was too unrealistic.

I’m planning on reading the second book in this series, but I don’t really plan on reading it anytime soon.