Vampire Academy: Frostbite and Mason Ashford's Exit vs. Adrian Ivashkov's Intro
On Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy: Frostbite, the loss of Mason Ashford, the gain of Adrian Ivashkov, and Rose Hathaway's first-person narration
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This post will contain spoilers from Vampire Academy: Frostbite by Richelle Mead.
I’ve been slowly but surely reading Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy books I bought in bulk from a used bookstore in or around September 2022. If that date sounds familiar to anyone who likes Vampire Academy, that’s when the short-lived Peacock series debuted. I read the first book ages ago, probably around 2009-2010 — the peak of The Twilight Saga and the premiere of The Vampire Diaries. I know I read it before the 2014 movie adaptation was released.
For some reason, though, I never went beyond that first book. I didn’t even buy any others, but I remember enjoying what I read. So, when the Peacock series rolled around, it was the perfect time to dive back into the books. I enjoyed the show. I saw potential in the expansive supernatural world explored through a TV series rather than a film franchise. I thought the cast was great, and the characters were similar to how I read them a decade prior.
But, like many supernatural YA shows before and after it, the streamer canceled Vampire Academy by January 2023, and I had a stack of books and no momentum to read them — until this year. I’ve been trying to work through the stacks and stacks of unread books on my shelves before I buy anything new, and the Vampire Academy books are a big part of that (There are six books in the original series and six books in the Bloodlines spinoff series).
I recently finished Vampire Academy: Frostbite, and I can’t stop thinking about the juxtaposition of Mason Ashford’s death and Adrian Ivashkov’s introduction.