Reading Die for Me was like getting a mini-tour of Paris, and I loved that aspect of the novel. I easily pictured Kate sitting in a sidewalk café, lost in her book. Amy Plum brings Paris to such vivid life that I wanted to grab my passport and hop on a plane. I would have given this three stars, but there are a few things that merit an extra half star. That would have been fine if I’d been able to take more than a mild interest in this couple and what happened to them. There are some action scenes towards the end, but the book is more of a love story than anything. Kate spends quite a bit of the novel mulling over the Vincent situation, and that does not make for especially compelling reading, at least for me. I had a hard time finding these two characters exciting to read about because there was nothing to distinguish them from the other Bella and Edward types I’d read about before. Vincent is another insanely good-looking, superhuman knight in shining armor with a tragic past. Kate is yet another heroine who becomes entangled with the paranormal and gets all angsty about whether or not her relationship with her supernatural boyfriend can work. Now, I confess to being a Twilight fan (though not as much as when I first read the books), but Die for Me doesn’t add anything groundbreaking to what’s become heavily traveled territory in YA. Eternal love ensues, but not without potential obstacles, like one character being immortal and such. Not-so-human guy follows human girl around for a bit. Human girl spots hot, enigmatic guy who later turns out to be not-so-human. There were quite a few shades of Twilight in Die for Me. If they hadn’t followed YA archetypes so closely, this could have been a standout read. In the end, though, this felt like just another average YA paranormal book, mainly because the characters seemed all too familiar. Review: Die for Me boasts a very novel premise, a gorgeous Parisian setting, and a beautiful cover. Being in the company of Vincent and his fellow revenants is also dangerous, because they have enemies who will stop at nothing to eliminate their foes.

To be with a revenant like Vincent, though, means watching him sacrifice his life for others over and over again, and Kate is unsure if she can handle that. Kate, still struggling with her grief, often spends her time in the company of only her books, but she’s about to be drawn out of her solitude and into an entirely different world once she meets the mysterious and handsome Vincent Delacroix. To Sum It Up: After losing their parents in a car accident, Kate Mercier and her sister leave New York to live with their grandparents in Paris.

Die for Me by Amy Plum