The Promise

Rose Hathaway made Dimitri Belikov a promise, in the way people make promises they never expect to keep: if he were ever turned Strigoi, she would find him and end it.

Blood Promise is her keeping it. Or trying to.

She has dropped out of St Vladimir's weeks before graduation, abandoned Lissa and the bond that connects them, and travelled to Siberia: to Baia, the town where Dimitri grew up, where his mother and sisters still live and do not yet know he is dead.

What It's About

The Siberian section is the strongest and strangest material Mead wrote. Rose arrives intending to gather information and instead is absorbed into the Belikov family, who take her in, feed her, and treat her as something between a guest and a daughter-in-law. Telling them what happened to Dimitri, and then not telling them what she intends to do about it, is a quietly excruciating thread.

She also meets Sydney Sage, an Alchemist, one of the humans who clean up after vampires and consider them abominations. Sydney is prickly, frightened, and unwilling to pretend otherwise, and she will go on to carry an entire spin-off series.

And then Rose finds Dimitri.

What follows is the reason to read this book. Strigoi Dimitri is not a monster wearing a familiar face. He is recognisably himself, with everything that made him gentle removed. He is patient. He is charming. He remembers everything they were to each other and uses all of it. He does not kill Rose. He keeps her, in a gilded room, wearing down her resistance with a persistence that is far more frightening than violence would be.

It is the best sustained antagonist writing in the series.

Where It Struggles, and Why It Divides People

Blood Promise separates Rose from the entire supporting cast for most of its length, and the series has always run on that ensemble. Lissa, Christian, Adrian and the rest appear only through the bond, in chapters that read as obligation rather than story. Readers who came for the found-family dynamic spend four hundred pages without it.

The Lissa subplot is the weakest thread Mead ever wrote. Lissa falls in with a bad crowd, experiments with self-destruction, and behaves in ways that feel manufactured to give the reader something to do while Rose is elsewhere.

The pacing is uneven. The Siberian first act is slow, the middle is extraordinary, and the resolution arrives abruptly and leaves a significant question deliberately unanswered, which is effective as a hook and frustrating as an ending.

The Velvet Coven Verdict

Blood Promise is the most uneven book in the Vampire Academy series and contains its single best sequence. Strigoi Dimitri is a genuinely great antagonist: seductive, patient, and horrifying precisely because he is not pretending to be someone else.

Whether the book works for you depends largely on how much you need the ensemble. Isolated, grieving, and single-minded, Rose is a narrower character than she is at school, and Mead is asking the reader to sit with that narrowness for a long time.

Read it for Dimitri. Endure the Lissa chapters. The payoff is coming in the next book, and it is not the payoff you want.

Content note: Captivity, coercion, blood-drinking with dubious consent, self-destructive behaviour.

Quick Reference

  • Author: Richelle Mead
  • Published: August 2009 (Razorbill)
  • Series: Vampire Academy, Book 4
  • Setting: Siberia: Baia and Novosibirsk
  • Tropes: Hunting the beloved, captivity, corrupted lover, found family, road trip
  • Spice level: 2/5, YA, uncomfortable rather than explicit
  • Status: #1 NYT Bestseller