Les fils de Vizaël

by Suzanne Roy

À la mort de son patron, Alice Demers décide de mener l’enquête. Durant son investigation, elle fait la rencontre de Michaël Falcon, qui a pour objectif de venger la mort de la victime, qui était son ami. Lorsqu’elle assiste à la scène, le monde d’Alice bascule. Non seulement ce Michaël n’est pas humain, mais elle comprend que son patron ne l’était pas davantage.

Ce qu’ils sont ? Des impurs : des êtres mi-humains mi-vampires, traqués depuis des siècles par le clan de Kaïl pour les punir de s’être enfuis alors qu’ils étaient soumis à l’esclavage.

Sous le charme de cet homme taciturne, Alice exige de tout connaître de son existence et l’aide à s’intégrer à l’époque actuelle. Leur idylle naît, mais se rapprocher d’un impur pourrait bien mettre sa vie en danger...

744 pages, Hardcover

Published June 1, 2026

About the author

Professeure de multimédia au collégial, Suzanne Roy a une formation en études littéraires, mais ne s’est remise à l’écriture qu’après de nombreuses années. Depuis, les idées pleuvent et elle ne s’arrête plus !

Reviews

[Émanuelle St-Amand]

⭐️⭐️½ — Les fils de Vizaël

I’m closing this book with very mixed feelings. The concepts and ideas behind the story are good, and that’s probably what kept me reading for as long as I did. Unfortunately, for such a long novel, it took until the last 200 or so pages for me to become genuinely interested and actually want to know what would happen next.

For almost the entire book, I felt irritated, bored, and honestly fed up. If I hadn’t made it a goal to finish the book so I could write a complete review, I truly think I would have DNF’d it and never picked it back up. To me, it’s simply not normal to only start genuinely wanting to know what happens next when you’re already approaching the end.

Unfortunately, Alice played a huge part in that experience. She irritated me for almost the entire novel, sometimes to the point where I seriously considered giving up on the book altogether. And inevitably, that leaves a bitter taste when you spend so many pages with a main character who makes you feel that way.

It was only toward the end that I finally started to genuinely like her. She felt different, more mature. I got the impression that everything she had gone through had finally changed her perspective and the way she approached her relationships. I just wish I had met this version of Alice much earlier.

Another thing that greatly contributed to my frustration with her was how heavily certain feminist remarks were emphasized throughout her thoughts and dialogue. I have absolutely no problem with a strong or independent female character, but here, I felt that some of these comments came up far too often and were sometimes unnecessarily dismissive toward men. The recurring “weak men” remarks, in particular, really got on my nerves.

After a while, it sometimes felt as though the story kept bringing everything back to this dynamic between men and women, when that simply wasn’t what I was looking for in this kind of story. Personally, when I pick up a vampire novel, I’m looking for romance, mystery, intrigue, the supernatural, and relationships that actually make me feel something.

Instead, these repeated remarks often pulled me out of the story and even affected the way I perceived Alice’s feelings. At times, I found it difficult to fully believe in certain tender moments between her and Michaël when another thought or comment would come along shortly afterward and break the moment or make it feel as though she constantly needed to position herself against the men around her.

And this is something I especially noticed toward the end with Vern: those remarks seemed to almost completely disappear. And honestly, it was such a relief. Alice felt much more natural in her relationship with him. She could still be strong, independent, and have plenty of personality without it constantly being expressed through dismissive remarks or opposition toward the man in front of her. Their relationship was finally allowed to breathe, leaving much more room for their connection, tenderness, and feelings.

But my biggest disappointment was probably the relationship between Alice and Michaël/Vizaël.

The story wants us to understand that they share this immense, deep, almost visceral love. And yet, despite the hundreds of pages devoted to their story, I never managed to feel that love with the intensity it was supposed to have.

I saw the major milestones of their relationship, but not enough of the little moments that turn two people into lovers.

I needed more conversations, more connection, more vulnerability, more small gestures, more intimate moments, and simply more ordinary moments that would have allowed their emotional bond to develop in front of me. Their relationship kept moving forward, but too often I felt like I was being asked to believe in the depth of their feelings rather than actually being allowed to experience it.

And yet, there were a few passages where I finally felt what I had been waiting for all along. Some of the later moments between Alice and Michaël were beautiful, tender, and much more emotionally charged. I even remember thinking, “Finally, I can actually feel the love in the writing.”

The problem?

We were already more than 300 pages into the book.

Those passages were exactly what I needed, but they came far too late and were far too few. I wish we had gotten moments like those much earlier and consistently throughout their relationship.

It’s even more frustrating because after Vizaël’s death, the novel shows us just how deeply Alice loved him. Her grief is overwhelming. She no longer wants to live without him, and even much later, that pain is still there.

So I understand that Michaël was an immense love in her life. I understand it because the book tells me so, but I wish I had been able to feel it just as deeply while he was still alive.

Ironically, I enjoyed the development of Alice and Vern’s relationship much more. Their relationship had more of what I had been missing before: the little gestures, closeness, everyday moments, connection, hesitation, and an intimacy that gradually develops over time. Their situation is obviously much more complicated, but emotionally, I found it much easier to understand how their attachment grew and how romantic feelings could develop between them.

It was ultimately during the last 200 or so pages that I finally started seeing all the potential I had sensed from the beginning. Alice became more interesting, the plot gained momentum, the relationships became deeper, and I finally felt that urge to keep turning the pages because I genuinely wanted to know what would happen next.

Unfortunately, for me, all of that came far too late.

That probably sums up my experience with this book better than anything else: it has good ideas and concepts with so much potential, along with a few moments I genuinely enjoyed. But I wish everything I finally found in those last couple hundred pages had been present much earlier in the novel.

2.5 stars, because the ending genuinely improved my overall opinion of the book, but unfortunately, it couldn’t erase the frustration and lack of interest I felt throughout most of my reading experience. ⭐️⭐️½