Rating: 
Summary: I Love This Book
Review: Now don't get me wrong, this book would've been great if it focused on a plot of some sort rather than the half-autobiography, half-totalcrap thing it did. Part one of the book is pretty good. I was getting into it even. Then it just brings you to present day and there's this wannabe terrorist group out to get them all. woopee. Taylor doesn't pay attention to detail very well i've noticed. Things just kinda happen randomly. Now, it might've been better if I had actually read the previous books in the series, but we'll never know now because I have no desire to read anything by Taylor again. Trust me, save your money.
Rating: 
Summary: Just plain stupid
Review: Now don't get me wrong, this book would've been great if it focused on a plot of some sort rather than the half-autobiography, half-totalcrap thing it did. Part one of the book is pretty good. I was getting into it even. Then it just brings you to present day and there's this wannabe terrorist group out to get them all. woopee. Taylor doesn't pay attention to detail very well i've noticed. Things just kinda happen randomly. Now, it might've been better if I had actually read the previous books in the series, but we'll never know now because I have no desire to read anything by Taylor again. Trust me, save your money.
Rating:
Summary: Fluff with a Bite
Review: Of all the Vampire Legacy books, The Vampire Vivienne, is the lightest. However, I see that as staying within the viewpoint of the character. Vivienne is fluffy (vampire in pink Angora because it looks good on her), sensual, and when forced sharp-tongued and savage. A wonderful read. Taylor has a keen sense of place, character and language as well as fully formed complexity of what is required for a vampire to survive among mere humans.
Rating:
Summary: Fluff with a Bite
Review: Of all the Vampire Legacy books, The Vampire Vivienne, is the lightest. However, I see that as staying within the viewpoint of the character. Vivienne is fluffy (vampire in pink Angora because it looks good on her), sensual, and when forced sharp-tongued and savage. A wonderful read. Taylor has a keen sense of place, character and language as well as fully formed complexity of what is required for a vampire to survive among mere humans.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent addition to an excellent series
Review: The Vampire Legacy keeps getting richer and richer. In the latest entry (#5), we turn to Vivienne, the current "leader" of the Cadre. This is Vivienne's life story from birth in pre-Revolutionary France to the present and, also, a deeper look into Ms. Taylor's vampire mythos. In order to not give spoilers, I won't give much detail, except to say that the narrative is full of twists and turns. As with Ms. Taylor's other works, the characterizations are first-rate, but in the Vampire Vivienne we get more developed plotting and a number of new and memorable characters. These books are so vivid and cinematic, when do we get a movie?
Rating:
Summary: A Turn for the Better
Review: There are vampire novels and romance novels and historical novels and even historical vampire romance novels. As a rule I don't read many of them. Then there are Karen E. Taylor novels. Unless she has some hidden away in her desk (you never know), I've read all of them at least twice. This is not quite as odd as it may seem, because if I happen to like a book there's no telling how many times I'll read it.
THE VAMPIRE VIVIENNE, the fifth book in Ms. Taylor's Vampire Legacy series, has managed to surprise me, and I don't surprise easily. The cast of characters includes several we know from her previous books, so the novel has a warm and familiar feel to it. This in itself is surprising, because THE VAMPIRE VIVIENNE is a departure from Ms. Taylor's previous novels. The universe of the Vampire Legacy stories is expanding.
To begin with there are new characters: Monique and Eduard, both of whom we meet in eighteenth century France, come to mind immediately - and there are Others. There are definitely Others.
Characters we know from Ms. Taylor's previous novels are given much greater depth: the enigmatic Max (a personal favorite of mine), Victor, and of course Vivienne Courbet herself. We follow her for three centuries.
What kind of person - what kind of vampire - is capable of surviving in a hostile and dangerous world for more than three hundred years? I started this book with very definite ideas and assumptions about that. Ms. Taylor's imagination has proved itself broader and deeper than mine. The growth and development of the vampire Vivienne is not what I expected after reading the first four Vampire Legacy novels.
For a few pages I had trouble believing what I was reading. Then, barely noticing the change, I had trouble not believing it. Vivienne Courbet is someone other than I had expected. Someone much more interesting.
I can think of no way to explain why THE VAMPIRE VIVIENNE is a compelling and thoroughly entertaining novel without revealing too much of the plot. You'll simply have to read the book yourself. After that your reaction may be the same as mine: I want to read the next book in the series _now_.
Rating:
Summary: Another wonderful chapter to the series.
Review: This is a wonderful book. If you've read all of the books in The Vampire Legacy, they you need to pick this book up and continue the voyage. If you haven't started this series, then you need to do so now.This chapter of the series, Vivienne is the main focus. The reader will learn of her life, death, and her life as a vampire. Her loves, passions, and the reader will also learn of her heartaches. The reader can't help but to feel a wide range of emotions as we read about Vivienne. As the story opens, the reader is enjoying the life we are lucky enough to share with Viv. Then about 1/2 was through something happens...someone is killing the members of The Cadre (don't know what that is? Then you need to start from the first book and work your was through the series) and wants to kill the vampires. Wth the help of some old friends, Vivienne must somehow stop a creature that's not human, but at the same time, not a vampire....but something to the likes that Vivienne has never seen. Karen Taylor dilevers a wonderful story, as usual. Her characters are life like and you just can't help but to care about them. As the series goes on, you feel as if your seeing old friends. Taylor's writing style keeps the reader glued to the book. The description she lays out for the reader is stunning. If you haven't read any of the series, I suggest you start with the first one, and enjoy the ride. I'm doing it now. At the end of Vivienne, it says that there will be a new chapter in The Vampire Legacy coming out in the fall of 2001. I can't wait to see what happens next.
Rating:
Summary: Surprising Excellence
Review: Up front: I don't like vampire fiction (or horror in general) and almost never read it. My idea of Hell is being forced to read the entire collected works of Ann Rice. So when THE VAMPIRE VIVIENNE was given to me, I opened it with no confidence at all that I would be able to get past the first chapter or two. But Karen Taylor is a professional colleague whose talents I greatly respect, so I gave it a try. What followed could serve as the definitive example of the phrase "pleasantly surprised." I LOVED it. Why? I think because the characters - and this is unique among the vampire books I've tried to read - are fully realized, believable people, not just melodramatic constructs. Most of the vampire-novel characters I've seen are about as credible as the cast of a soap opera. Karen Taylor, however, makes hers come alive; I feel I KNOW them. (Some of them better than I would prefer, actually. This is a very scary book in places - precisely because you can believe in the characters, their relationships and motives, and that makes the menace much more real.) It seems strange to speak of one of the Undead as a living, breathing personality (I almost said "full-blooded", aaghh) but you know what I mean. This is also a very erotic book - not in the all-too-common soft-BDSM-porn sense, but in a subtler, more elegant way. I confess to having the hots for Vivienne. She can bite me any time. Buy this book and read it. Ignore the people who complained because they couldn't understand the plot, or because it didn't fit the traditional (i.e. hackneyed) vampire-fiction templates. This is a hell of a book. Karen Taylor is a hell of a writer.
Rating:
Summary: Surprising Excellence
Review: Up front: I don't like vampire fiction (or horror in general) and almost never read it. My idea of Hell is being forced to read the entire collected works of Ann Rice. So when THE VAMPIRE VIVIENNE was given to me, I opened it with no confidence at all that I would be able to get past the first chapter or two. But Karen Taylor is a professional colleague whose talents I greatly respect, so I gave it a try. What followed could serve as the definitive example of the phrase "pleasantly surprised." I LOVED it. Why? I think because the characters - and this is unique among the vampire books I've tried to read - are fully realized, believable people, not just melodramatic constructs. Most of the vampire-novel characters I've seen are about as credible as the cast of a soap opera. Karen Taylor, however, makes hers come alive; I feel I KNOW them. (Some of them better than I would prefer, actually. This is a very scary book in places - precisely because you can believe in the characters, their relationships and motives, and that makes the menace much more real.) It seems strange to speak of one of the Undead as a living, breathing personality (I almost said "full-blooded", aaghh) but you know what I mean. This is also a very erotic book - not in the all-too-common soft-BDSM-porn sense, but in a subtler, more elegant way. I confess to having the hots for Vivienne. She can bite me any time. Buy this book and read it. Ignore the people who complained because they couldn't understand the plot, or because it didn't fit the traditional (i.e. hackneyed) vampire-fiction templates. This is a hell of a book. Karen Taylor is a hell of a writer.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent vampire tale
Review: Vivienne Courbet was born in Paris, but ultimately ran away from her home. In 1719, she went to a brothel, The where the news of her beauty, youth and innocence eventually reached the attention of her employers Victor and Mona. The duo was as impressed as her customers and converted the vibrant Vivienne into one of them, a vampire.
She easily changed to her new lifestyle and became the toast of Paris, but left her birth city during the height of the Terror of the French Revolution. She lived quite comfortably into the twenty-first century when she became head of the powerful vampire council the Cadre at a critical time when the Others attack her species. Vivienne knows she and her kind must identity and either neutralize or destroy their enemy before she and others like her permanently die.
For all those horror and supernatural readers who have followed the Vampire Legacy, the current tale THE VAMPIRE VIVIENNE provides many of the answers left open from the previous books. The tale also features the return of popular characters to add to the feel of completeness. Yet Karen E Taylor also refreshes her story line with a brilliant twist that entertains and hypnotizes sub-genre fans. Harriet Klausner
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