Grab some garlic and start sharpening your mother’s wooden spoons because there are vampires living in the most unlikely of places.
I’ve always wanted to meet a vampire. Not to stake some poor bloodsucker as he sleeps in his coffin or have some sexy vampire’s bite me on the neck, but just to see a creature so rare and infamous. What can I say? Some people want to sail to Easter Island, others want to fling themselves out of an airplane, I want to shake hands with a vampire. Well, maybe I should prioritize getting a girlfriend first, but a vampire sighting is pretty high up on the list. Trust me, a lot of kids my age dream about it. Like my two best friends, Rini and Xander. We spent half the summer searching the most notorious cities in the United States for the undead, but so far, no luck.
That’s why it came as a total shock to discover a living, breathing vampire in our hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. (Okay, so he’s more undead and not breathing, but you get the picture.) At first we were kind of excited, but then pretty freaked because it turns out our new fanged friend has a hold on the city’s teenage population and a specific thirst for their blood. Which, in a word—bites.
What I Expected: a vampire story, of course.
My Thoughts
This wasn’t the typical vampire story. for one, nobody was falling madly in love with a vampire, and the main character was a guy. That alone kept me reading.
The ending, which made me smile because it was just so different from other vampire books, was the best part of all. At the beginning, though, I had my doubts about the book. The writing felt a bit off, because sometimes there would be sudden digressions about things that didn’t need to be there, and there were a few errors, but the story more than made up for it.
I personally liked this book so much more than I thought I would. I mean, any book with vampires in it is a complete no-no for me. I know, it’s really biased of me- but hey, I enjoyed THIS book. Of course, that’s probably because vampires were in a negative light for once, and that made all the difference.
I loved Herbert. He was a little blind at times about things staring him in the face, but I found him completely likeable and definitely a great protagonist. Xander was okay, I guess, and Rini made me roll my eyes with HER blindness. Lana, Maureen/Violet, the rest of the characters were surprisingly well-rounded, but it was Grandma who was, hands down, the most real character apart from Herbert.
Parting Thoughts: I very much enjoyed this book, because it’s for those people who wonder why a girl would fall so deeply in love with a vampire who’s about to kill her half the time anyway.
Rating: 4/5.
Note: I received this book for review from Adrianne Ambrose.