In a post-Twilight world, most books of this genre will be compared to that body of work. I think a better comparison with Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy is P.C. Cast's House of Night series. I can safely say, VA is much better than House of Night, but there are unfortunately still too many similarities for my taste.

The mythos for this world has a very similar "feel" with House of Night -- There are "live" vampires, "dead" vampires, and then a group of "protectors" dedicated to protect the "live" ones. Rose Hathaway is the protector for her "live" vampire friend Lissa, who both attend "high school" for their "special needs". In any case, the mythos is interesting and well constructed, but nothing we haven't seen before. Though it's definitely nice to have a strong female heroine for a change (Cough Bella Cough).

Mead uses an interesting device in that the book starts two years after "things start happening" and slowly reveals what transpired through a sequence of ever revealing flashbacks. This was a good decision (and actually made me think I had come into the middle of a series, rather than the first book), but it makes me wonder what the style of successive books will be. While the characters are more "serious" than their House of Night counterparts, there was still too much "high school drama" to be going on with -- it's one of the things I appreciated from Meyer's Twilight series: a conscious effort to keep the needless high school drama to a minimum.

(And I apologize for the excessive use of quotes in the previous paragraphs. Better not to take these things too seriously.)

I enjoyed the book enough to add the sequel to my to-read list. It's a fast read, so think of it as quick-escape entertainment.