Four Vampire Books Read This Weekend: Vamped by Lucienne Diver, How to Be a Vampire by Amy Gray, Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side by Beth Fantaskey, and Eternal by Cynthia Leitich Smith

It was so delicious to not be traveling this weekend and really take the donut off my reading bat.  I attacked "the pile" (actually it's a row of books on my kitchen desk that winks at me when I go in there multiple times a day) and decided I'd focus on all the yummy new books that Cynthia Leitich Smith sent us after I won her fabulous October giveaway.

First up was Lucienne Diver's Vamped, and I think from the cover it's  obvious why I chose it.  Isn't it fabulous?  I think that the cover also does a good job indicating what's inside - Gina, our trusty protagonist, is a former mean girl fashionista who wakes up in her coffin and quickly figures out that her recent make-out session with chess club geek turned suddenly superhunk, Bobby, involved a little more nipping than usually experienced in seven minutes in heaven.  Her annoying neanderthal boyfriend, Chaz (hello, is that a name that just screams "dump me"?) gets them into a car accident with his road rage and she "dies".  Bobby is waiting patiently for Gina as she claws her way out of her coffin (and ruins her manicure) to explain what's happened and she quickly realizes that she just may be, for once in her life, truly in love with someone.

But all is not easy for our young and undead lovers.  Bobby is very coveted and not just by young women impressed by his six pack.  He and Gina are quickly captured by Mellisande, a vampire that makes Gina's high school reign look like a Mother Theresa leper public service announcement.  Mellisande wants Bobby who it turns out has tremendous mental powers now that he is undead (it's always the chess guys, isn't it?).  Gina finds herself in a dungeon with a bunch of other kids that supposedly succumbed to the "why not drink and drive" mentality or other "accidents" and realizes that "Smelly Melli," her pet name for Mellisande, is raising a vampire army to overthrow the council and that Bobby and the rest of the young vampires are pawns in her bid for power.  Can she use her bitchiness for good and save not only the boy she loves, but everyone else?

Diver is a literary agent (check out her blog for a great window into the controversies and discussion in this interesting area of publishing) who has published a few stories and books under another name as well.  She has a great sense of humor and Vamped, written from Gina's point of view, has a breezy style that falls in with her "mean girl with a heart of gold" theme.  The plot moves, let me warn you, and there were times that I felt a little headachey keeping up with everything that was going on.  I wish there was a little less action and more character development of Gina and Bobby - I wanted a little more backstory and definitely more romantic moments between them since the few that existed really sizzled.  There is a sequel, Revamped, coming in 2010 so I'll definitely read that and see if it satisfies the couple of itches she left. 

Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side by Beth Fantaskey was a total dark horse (no pun on the title intended).  I was so sucked into this book that midway through I got really irritated at how it had been marketed - everything I had read or seen depicted it as a fluffy "girl meets vampire and discovers she's one, too and gets a funny book to guide her!" plot and it was anything but.  Jessica Packwood knows her anthropologist parents adopted her from Romania when her parents died in some weird cult coup but she's startled when a good-looking but bizarre guy shows up at her rural Pennsylvania bus stop and calls her by her real name (which is Antanasia Dragomir - side note: are there only four vampire surnames?  The same ones crop up again and again.  I think authors need to raid a Romanian phone book and think outside the box).  It turns out that the hottie making a BIG impression in her high school is none other than Lucius Vladescu, the heir to the other most powerful vampire clan (besides the Dragomirs) and the vampire to whom she was betrothed as an infant in order to end centuries of vampire/human bloodshed as the families battled one another for power.