The Reformed Vampire Support Group -- Catherine Jinks

Vampires.  It's been hard to avoid them over the last few years, what with their sparkly skin and their super strength and speed and extra-sensory powers, amazingly good looks and ability to sell 80 bazillion books without breaking a sweat or breathing hard.  (Or breathing at all, for that matter.) 

Nina Harrison is here to tell us the truth about being a vampire. 

Being a vampire isn't the slightest bit sexy.  Or exciting.  Or fun.  Every Tuesday night, she has to go to a meeting of The Reformed Vampire Support Group and listen to a bunch of sickly vamps whinge on and on about their monotonous lives.  That, and she gets lectured about how her Nadia Blackstone novels are propagating unhelpful and unfair myths about vampires, thus making their existence more dangerous.  This has been her life for 25 years, since 1973, when she was fanged at age fifteen.

The mysterious slaying of a fellow support group member is scary, yes.  But it's also exciting.  Because now, with a few of the other members of the group, she's going to track down the killer.

I was really excited about this one, because it sounded like such a fun take on the vampire genre and just so different from what's been cluttering up my shelves and floor and mailbox lately.  And because I loved the cover art.

I still love the cover art.  Actually, I like it even more after having read the book.

The inside of the book didn't do a whole lot for me.  Yeah, it was a cool idea, and I get that the repetitiveness of Nina's existence was very probably deliberate because that's how she felt about her life and as she was telling the story, that'd be expected to come through, BUT that kind of repetition doesn't make for much entertainment value.  For me, anyway. 

I never really felt much of anything for the characters.  While I read, I wasn't particularly concerned about their safety and mostly distracted because I couldn't figure out if Dave (a vamp in the support group) was in lurrrve with Nina or if he was secretly her long-lost, unknown father.  (Actual biological father, not her sire.  She knows who to blame her vampirism on.)  I was very surprised when, at the end of the book, the answer to that question made me smile -- that reaction suggested that I cared more than I thought I did.  Despite that, when I closed the book, I had no desire to open it again.  Or to revisit Nina & Co. at another time for another adventure.

All of that isn't to say that there aren't good things about the book -- I enjoyed seeing how Catherine Jinks played with the conventions of the genre (Horace alone made the book ultimately worthwhile for me) and the writing is smart.  And quite often witty.  

But I still didn't find it ultimately enjoyable.  My lack of emotional attachment, as I said, was the main issue -- hardly any of the characters were particularly likable (whining gets really old really fast, and most of them do a lot of it) and hardly any of the characters were all that interesting* -- but I also felt like Nina just told, told, told me the story, rather than letting me experience it.  This book is similar in a lot of ways to the Evil Genius books (tone and style, crazy plot twists), but I felt that there was much more to Cadel and his co-stars than to any of the characters in this one.

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*I can do unlikable if I'm trying to understand what makes someone tick.  But if the inner workings of the mind and heart are pretty apparent from minute one, there isn't much to figure out.

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Previously:

Evil Genius
Genius Squad

Comments

[Mandy]

I'm sad to say that I got about 50 pages in and put the book down. Thanks for the review--I have been questioning my abruptness with this one.

Mandy

[beth]

Crap. I really want to like these books, but if you didn't love it, I don't think I will.

[Rose]

Evil Genius was okay, but my favorite of her books are the Pagan series. If you haven't read them, you definitely should.

[Fuse #8]

Yeah, I picked this up in the bookstore yesterday and got a fair ways into it. My reaction was similar to your own. It's all well and good to get a sense of the dreary dullness of your average everyday vampire's life . . . but does it have to be so boring? A pity. I worship at the alter of Jinks.

[iscaria]

I kinda liked this book. It's one of those books that sound better in theory than it is in practice. I mean, the vampires in therapy idea is hilarious in theory, but in the book there's no hysterically funny scene of the vampires being all "Hi, my name's Nina, and I'm a bloodoholic." I wasn't confused about Dave possibly being Nina's father because the book made it clear that he was 19 years old when he was infected in 1973, while Nina was 15 years old when she was infected in the same year. But I don't blame anyone for getting confused about who the character's were. I had to put the book down and go back and reread the earlier chapters to get a clear idea of who was who. (It wasn't as bad as Evil Genius when it was only on my fourth read that I actually had a proper idea of who all the university lecturers were). I didn't really think the plot was dull, though. It took a while for them to get out of Sydney, but after that it was all illegal bloodsports and attempted murder. Mostly I just liked it because it was funny.

[Leila]

Oh, thanks for that, iscaria, about Dave's age -- I missed that they were infected the same year. For some reason I thought he got infected right around when her father disappeared, so half-leapt to that Maybe-He's-Her-Missing-Father conclusion.