4/5 for Belle Morte by Bella Higgin

I have read this book while it was on Wattpad. I am still surprised at how good it is! The story was well structured and developed. No part felt too rushed. My favorite part was the romance though. As the first book in a series, I enjoyed the romance wasn't rushed. The predicted couple really get to know each other, instead of just getting thrown in. This development is refreshing in a book, because many books just skip the getting-to-know each other phase.

This was interesting, but didn’t have me in a chokehold.

My biggest issue was that it took a long time to get into and even then, it didn’t pick up for me. The world building and character development were there, but I felt detached from the story. It could be that nothing surprised me. I predicted everything so it was more like going through the motions. But, the writing style was good. Everything was detailed and well written.

I sort of liked the main character. I liked the passion, determination, and fire she had. I think it was just the fact that she was young and in certain moments it was obvious and not in a positive way. I struggle to read YA novels as I get older for this reason, so take that with a grain of salt if you’re someone who does like YA novels. Compared to other younger heroines, I liked Renie a lot more. What I didn’t like was how contradictory she was on her stance about vampires. There’s a ton of back and forth on that front.

However, it had some funny moments and a little bit of tension and steam. I liked the side characters as well. Renie had some great friends in Jason and Roux. Overall, I’m interested in the second sequel, but I’m not sure I’d pick it up if it’s as slow going.

DNF at 45%

I really tried to give this story a shot, but it just didn't work. I started guessing the entire plot by the 30% mark and was proven right (as far as i know). The typical YA/Wattpad tropes also didn't help.

I'm really missing depth to the story. I was more interested in the lifestyle of the donors than the actual plot.
The character work was very surface level, Renie didn't have ANY other character trait than wanting to find her sister. I also do not like Higgins writing style and I think it could use some work, some big action moments had no tension at all.
I do like the dual POV and the quick changes between it.

I would just recommend this book if you like insta-lovey, paranormal romances with a predictable plot.

This book was such an interesting take on vampire fiction- I've been loving anything with vampires in it lately (they're making a comeback!) and this was no exception! I found the story progressed almost a little too quickly at times (I wanted a bit more backstory and development for some things) but hopefully that comes in the next book. This kept me on my toes and I really enjoyed the ending! Can't wait for more!

The premise of this book is what initially had me interested. The twist on vampires not being a secret to the world, but actually being celebrities was different and unique. Without spoiling anything, I enjoyed the book overall. The characters were interesting enough to keep me reading. 3.5/5 stars for me. The world building wasn’t as in depth as I would’ve loved but it was definitely a fun read!

DNF

I hate doing this but this book just wasn't for me. I was drawn in by the premise of vampires because I'm obsessed but I just could not get into this story. The writing was awkward and the storyline didn't keep me interested.

There are always books that I regret reading. This is one that I regret reading before the rest of the books have been published.

The mystery that started in the beginning, a lost a desperate mystery for Renie, kept me going until the answers were revealed. As answers are revealed, more questions come up that desperately need answers. The plot seemed typical, and while I predicted most, I still can’t wait to read the second book. If anything, just to figure out the fate of June.

This review is after reading the arc received through NetGalley.

Thank you to netgalley and Wattpad books for the e arc!

Renie was invited to be a donor at belle morte a house full of vampire to find her sister, who went missing 5 months prior.
I did enjoy this book for the most part. I also liked the vampire being celebrities and found it really interesting and different. I also enjoy how renie hated the vampires and tried to hate them as long as possible. It felt really realistic. I also really like the forbidden Romance trope! While I did enjoy some of it, I did feel a lack of connection to the characters. I just didn’t find myself relating to the main character. I also didn’t quite believe Edmond falling for renie so quickly. I generally don’t like the instalove trope

I think this book will be a hit with teen readers. For me as a middle aged person it skewed fairly young in characters and dialogue if not in plot. The central story of one sister trying to find what happened to her missing sister in a house of vampires is an intriguing one but I found myself pulled out of the story often with the sort of over the top dramatic dialogue and reactions. I will definitely keep this in mind for our teen readers who are missing the golden age of teen vampire romance.

Despite only giving this 3 stars, I actually quite enjoyed this! When I got this ARC and saw that it was originally a Wattpad novel, I expected this to read like fanfiction, and I wasn't disappointed in that area.
I breezed through this, but there was honestly nothing groundbreaking and I saw most of the plot twists coming from a mile away. Even that ending wasn't a big shocker to me.
I liked the whole Vampire celebrities residing in a gated house hiring blood donors concept, but I didn't love the execution nor the (surprise, surprise) insta-love.
Renie and Edmond were an okay pair, despite Renie being TSTL sometimes and Edmond having multiple personality disorder, so my favorite character had to be Roux!

However, with the way this ended in a semi-cliffhanger, I am quite curious if there will be a sequel, because I feel like the story has potential!

Thank you to NetGalley and wattpad books for allowing me to obtain an arc in exchange for an honest review! All thoughts and opinions are mine and mine alone.


I liked this one! A little cheesy- but I believe this is targeted towards a YA/NA leading audience so the cheese amount worked. While vampires being out in the open isn’t something new in the paranormal realm, it is for this sub genre I think. I can see this one being on the paranormal/ya romance tiktok-booktok trends. The ending was (predictable) but led to a great cliffhanger for the next book(s) in the series and makes me look forward to it.

Another case of being lured by the cover, and staying for the characters!!! This book was so good!!

What I liked about the book:
1. As reality shows are kinda my guilty pleasure (don't you judge me!), I really liked the idea of a vampire celebrity house that would bring regular people in to be donors. That is a super interesting concept, and I loved how it wasn't a large part of the plot where they had to mind how they were in front of cameras a lot. I feel that could have gotten convoluted really fast, and we were spared from that.

2. Short, dual POV chapters!!! This is my crack!!!

3. I love that there are mystery components, swoony moments, action-packed scenes, and unadulterated happiness even in the lowest of times. This book is definitely one hell of a paranormal rollercoaster. Those last couple chapters were something else!!!

4. The characters:

Renie - I honestly did not think I would like Renie as much as I did. This girl is stubborn as sh*t and I'm here for it! Especially at the end of the book in some of the final scenes, she really just drives right into the chaos, but then still has realistic thoughts about why she's even doing it. I very much relate to this as a stubborn person who acts before she thinks a lot.

Edmond - Hot vampire dude who speaks French, loves to read, and is willing to throw down and be punished to save his girl? Ummmmm yes please! I don't know what it is, but the idea of a good looking man calling me terms of endearment in a foreign language does something otherworldly to me.

Ysanne - I did not want to like you, but I'm definitely falling for you, you alpha-female. I love the complexity of your character and how you are willing to open up to Renie because you are smart enough to see her value.

Etienne - All I'm going to say is I called it.

Jason - You are hilarious! Definitely the comedic relief in this book. I love that you are pining hard for Gideon, and I really think he is feeling you too. Hopefully we see more come of this in the second book!

Roux - Roux, Roux, Roux, you beautiful little badass. You are bestie goals and literally an angel!!! Daphne and Velma don't need no Fred!!!

Ludovic - I love how you know things can't happen, but you're such a good friend that you don't care about the rules. You seem like a total badass, and you BETTER end up with Roux in the second book!

5. THAT COVER IS GORGEOUS!

Why it didn't get 5 stars:
1. I felt the way the story was told was a little odd. It was dual POV, but Renie's sections were in first person, while Edmond's were in third person. I love the dual POV, I just wish they were both in first person. The consistency nerd in me was inwardly cringing every time it shifted.

2. A bit predictable, but I'm not reading vampire romance because it's groundbreaking...

Thank you NetGalley and Wattpad for the opportunity to read this ARC. The honest opinions above are being given voluntarily.

4 belle stars! Check it out April 5th!

Belle Morte (Bella Higgens) is a new release in the recently reviving vampiric subgenre of paranormal YA fiction. Originally published online at Wattpad to success, it was recently revised and is now being published by Wattpad’s publishing branch. Belle Morte takes place in a world where vampires are celebrities, and reside in revered Houses, such as Belle Morte, where humans can apply to enter. Successful applicants are taken into the House to be donors, who are pampered in the lap of luxury while being required to offer their blood up to any vampire who wants it. The story follows Renie, a new donor who hates vampires and has only applied to investigate her sister, who has gone missing while inside Belle Morte. Renie’s quest is complicated by the connection pulling her toward Edmond, the handsome vampire who knows more than he’s telling about Renie’s missing sister.

Author Higgins has a very casual style of writing that is very straightforward. This makes her writing very accessible and easy to let yourself fall into, but it does mean that her writing has a lot of telling. Whether the reader finds that to be a fault or a virtue is entirely up to personal preference.

Higgins does some interesting things with the way vampires fit into the fabric of this world. (In Higgins’ world, while vampires have been around for centuries if not millennia, they have only been public about their existence for the last few years.) Specifically something that stands out to me is Higgins’ reversal of a problematic pattern in vampiric fiction: the temptation to include vampires that were on the side of the South in the American Civil War. (No, I don’t know why so many major vampire books do it, but Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, and Interview with a Vampire all fall into this trap.) Higgins reverses this. While the story is set in England and the vampiric characters are primarily European, Higgins does mention vampires that were slaves in their human lives. It’s a small detail, but given the genre’s problematic tendency to do the opposite, I appreciated it.

Overall, if you don’t like the vampiric romance subgenre, Belle Morte probably won’t be to your taste. But if you enjoy these kinds of books, then Belle Morte will be a fun read for you.

P.S.
I do feel obliged to mention that the formatting of my digital ARC copy was…horrendous, there’s no way around it. The first letter of the first word of each chapter was on a completely different line than the rest (not larger or stylized) just separate, but a worse offender was that constantly paragraph breaks were missing, which sometimes made it confusing to tell who was talking when dialogue from two different characters was in the same paragraph. I’m operating on the assumption that this was a technical error (either exclusive to my device, or perhaps the book hasn’t gone through formatting yet, or the wrong type of file was sent to my kindle) and that the finished copy will be properly formatted, so I didn’t factor it into my rating.

Human girl tries to solve what happened to her sister by going into a house of vampires and meets a super hot vampire? check. Forbidden romance? check.

I like the idea of this book and the world structure. I think the concept was a cool twist on vampire romances and vampire worlds. H0w ever it did fall a little flat for me. I felt like a lot of detail was missing that could have taken this book to the next level.

I liked how fast paced it was and overall I had fun reading it, I just wish there had been more.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me an arc in exchange for an honest review.

I gave this book a 3/5 stars. I was very excited to read this because I found the idea of vampires being treated as celebrities to be new and exciting.

Things I liked:
- the dual POV
- the main character's best friend, Roux

The things I disliked:
- the main character
- the plot: the book was premised differently, with a focus on her trying to discover what happened to her sister, however I felt that wasn't where the story actually went. Additionally, the mystery was revealed too quickly.
- the timeline of the characters falling for each other: the characters could have had a bit more time to have their feelings developed. It felt very insta love-y
- Edmonds character felt a little flat

Overall, I went into this book excited but unfortunately the book was a little disappointing.

I received this ARC, this doesn’t influence my review. This book was a good read, but I didn’t like the dual POVs. The world building was okay, I liked the characters.

I hate writing bad reviews but honestly I could tell that this was a wattpad book. The writing wasn't great, the characters were flat and annoying and so so so stereotypical and unrealistic. All the side characters were basically accessories. Some characters seemed important at the beginning of the book but then basically disappeared for the majority of it only to pop back up again at the end. Everything felt rushed. The main character was so so so annoying and was always either angry, or upset that she was having a good time while she didn't know what was happening to her sister. The romance between main character and love interest wasn't believable or very interesting. The plot was predictable. Despite all of this I kept reading (skimming some parts that were too boring) so for that I give it a little more than one star. Maybe 1.5. I'm glad that this author is getting published and hopefully her writing will improve as she gets more practice.

Vampires are the ultimate reclusive celebrities— living in mansions together with an inner circle of “donors,” a highly coveted role for humans who are employed to feed them. Humans who are offered the position are guaranteed fame and fortune after their time in the houses, as well as an inside look into the lives of the world’s most mysterious and obsessed over figures, in exchange for their blood. Renie is probably the only person ever chosen as Donor who isn’t completely under the vampires’ spell, she applied for the role to find out what happened to her sister who seemingly dropped off the face of the earth after accepting her dream job at Belle Morte several months ago.

If I’m being perfectly honest here, this book reads like the very rough pitch for a CW show that I would have gone absolutely feral over as a teen. And like most of the CW shows that I’ve seen, it features a loose mystery that the characters try to solve in the background and character developments that can mostly be explained by “well this character is hot.”

There is little-to-no introduction for almost every character, assuming that readers are as in the know about the celebrities that make up the cast of characters living in Belle Morte. It makes sense from a narrative perspective, but as a reader, I had no clue who the people in this book were supposed to be. Their relationships, appearances, and so much more is just left unsaid, as if it is understood that every reader is up to date on the gossip in the world of the book. So while starting a new book can always be a little jarring until you get a handle on all of the characters and worldbuilding, this one never actually resolves that— something that left me vaguely unsettled throughout the entire book.

There were a lot of things in this book that bothered me, but none so much as the fact that everything was just said and never actually shown at any point in the book. Generally, not a lot is left to the imagination because characters will state things, like broad generalizations that they have secrets or dark pasts or feelings, as facts in conversation with each other without ever really getting into specifics. In this insta-love at first sight book, sexual tension was never really something that I noticed between the characters so much as they told each other that they apparently had a lot of it. In fact, aside from the fact that I knew it was coming, the romantic relationship between Renie and Edmond just sort of happens? There’s not much preamble to it, they don’t really interact with each other much besides noticing that the other is hot and then bam, they’re making out in the library.

Okay, I’m not going to lie, at one point in reading this, I was really getting into it. There are parts of the worldbuilding that are genuinely well thought out, and I think that at its core, this story really has legs. However, upon further reflection (ahem, the next morning), I realize I was also drunk at the same time, which may or may not be a coincidence. The storytelling felt like it was always missing a sentence here or there with the tiny narrative jumps it made. I think that there were a lot of things that would get resolved if it was given just a bit more editing, but I got the feeling that everyone involved in proofreading was so deep into the story that they left out a lot of key details (and spelling and grammatical edits) that would have made it flow so much better.

And if I want to be truly honest here, this book has no resolution. I don’t think that this is a spoiler, the story genuinely just ENDS. I expected there to be at least three more chapters between the end of the story and the acknowledgements page. So many loose ends are just kind of thrown onto the page as it ends, that could very well be setting up a sequel, but it isn’t even remotely close to what I would call a cliffhanger ending.

All in all, this book kind of reads like a Twilight meets Love Island fanfiction, starring THEE Count of Monte Cristo, set in a house that I was convinced was absolutely Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends (shag carpet in different colors per every room? It’s either a tacky nightmare or deliberately color schemed so you can tell these cartoon rooms apart or else they wouldn't be mentioned at all, right?). The idea of it is absolutely there, but I really do think that it needs work. Would I read a sequel? Yes, but I think I would want to take another pass at reading this story once it’s been through a few more rounds of editing because it just isn’t there yet as a standalone and almost needs more to prop it up.

Thank you to NetGalley and Wattpad for letting me read this book in exchange for an honest review.

“There is no greater loneliness than immortality.”

Vampires are regarded as the royals of celebrity culture. When Renie’s sister June severs all contact after signing up to be a donor for the infamous Belle Morte house of vampires; Renie has no other choice than to follow in her footsteps in an attempt to discover what happened to her.

With the lead male character being called Edmond, I was very worried when I started this that it would a vomit induced recap of Twilight, thankfully Renje is no Bella. It was a entertaining book that I read in one sitting, because I had to know if my theories were correct. They were, but the story still has enough points to keep your rabid curiosity guessing throughout.

Whilst I found the romance believable, Edmond was likeable but a little too bland for my tastes. His memories seemed more interesting than his present day self.

Apart from that the characters are great, especially the friends Renie makes along the way. The vampire politics involving the council and the leaders of each house is really intriguing and something we will hopefully learn more about as the series progresses.

All in all it’s a fun vampire novel and hopefully the start of something great.

Overall an average read for me. This cover is stunning but I was not really invested in the story. I did not enjoy the formatting on the arc but of course that will be fixed in the physical formatting of the novel.