The Vampire Diaries: The Awakening - L. J. Smith

1991, 254 pages.
This is the first book of “The Vampire Diaries” series. I was curious after watching the tv series so I decided to read the first book. It should be clear that the tv series does not follow the plot of the book. It is a different story. Some of the characters of the tv series are based on some characters from the book or a combination of more than one character, and some plot line ideas were used and changed. But the book is very different than the tv series.
In the book’s main plotline there’s Elena, a high school student, blond with blue eyes, the queen of her school, “the girl all the boys want and all the girls want to be”. She can get anyone she wants, but she doesn’t want anyone, until she meets handsome and mysterious Stephan, a new student in the school who prefers to keep to himself and stay away, especially from Elena.
The story goes between Elena’s point of view and Stephan’s, and when we get to his part, we learn that he’s a vampire, he tries to feed off animals and not humans, and he stays away from Elena both because she is a too big temptation for him to drink her blood, and because she has an amazing resemblance to Katherine, the girl he used to love in Italy a few centuries ago, in a love triangle with his older brother Damon, a love triangle that ended tragically.
The plot continues in two parallel times, in the now – the story of Stephan and Elena, in the past – the story of Stephan, Damon and Katherine.
I wasn’t really drawn into the story. Though it was written long before Twilight, it felt like a pale imitation to it. The story tries to be frightening and mysterious right from the beginning, starts with the sentence “Dear Diary, Something awful is going to happen today.” Before we know anything about the characters or the story. It just doesn’t work.
The characters are very shallow, with no depth to them, and they do not develop throughout the story. It is also not easy to like them. Elena is the bitchy queen of the school who hurts the boy who loves her and uses the girls who admire her.
It is a very easy and quick read, a short book that’s written in a simple and non-complicated way, so if you need a readable book that doesn’t take too much effort and concentration this could work for you. I decided not to go on to the next books in the series and settle for the tv series.