bookshelves of doom: Insatiable -- Meg Cabot

Okay, so I was pretty done with vampires. Because... well, I'm sure I don't need to explain that.

And, for the most part, I was pretty done with Meg Cabot. Not that I have particularly strong feelings about her books, but the last few I've read haven't done anything for me.

The premise of Insatiable grabbed me, though, and I brought it along with me to the wedding weekend. And I did read the whole thing¹ over the course of the weekend. So it held me that much, anyway.

But. But but but.

Okay, first, the premise: Meena Harper² writes for the looooooooooooong-running soap opera Insatiable. She isn't at all pleased when:

1. Nepotism leads to her not getting a promotion, which goes to Shoshanna, a wicked slacker of a co-worker whom Meena is always covering for and then...
2. ...Shoshanna introduces a lame VAMPIRE storyline to cash in on the current vampire mania. Which the higher-ups, of course, lurrrve.

It isn't that Meena doesn't believe in the paranormal -- after all, she's secretly (well, mostly secretly) a precog who can predict death -- she's just sick and tired of vampires. Which, as we all know, is understandable.

But then she meets Lucien Antonescu, and pretty immediately falls for him. It helps that she doesn't see a death in his future -- odd, that...

So. Back to the buts. While there are some fun bits -- there's a cranky vampire hunter and I liked Jack Bauer the dog and I liked Meena's next-door neighbors -- overall, Insatiable fell flat for me. It felt phoned-in and uninspired and it felt like it was an attempt to cash in on the tail-end of vampire-mania AS WELL AS the current vampire-backlash³. Among other annoyances, there were multiple references to the difference between smooching/being close to Lucian's cool-cool-coolness and Alaric the Vampire Hunter's hot-hot-hotness, which brought the Edward/Jacob question/pairing/dichotomy immediately to mind. The whole thing felt like a creation of Shoshanna and the marketing folks, rather than of Meena, which made the whole book seem rather disingenuous and hypocritical, if that makes any sense.

Not that I read too much into these things, of course.

Then again, there were also bits that were clearly riffing on Twilight-- the rehearsal scene in which they use the whole "SAY IT" bit was particularly good, but a quarter-of-a-page of particularly good doesn't make up for 448¾ pages of meh.

It was also repetitive. Occasionally excessively so. These two sentences were BOTH on page 90, less than two inches apart:

"She couldn't help but feel a little guilty about the fact that she'd just been heading upstairs with the intent of killing off Taylor's new love interest."

"She didn't think now would be a good time to point out that she was planning on writing a romantic lead for Cheryl who was going to put a stake through the heart of Taylor's new on-screen boyfriend."

Dude. I got it the first time.

As it was published for the adult market, it's got sex and violence and whatnot, though the sex isn't particularly graphic and the bad stuff that happens on-screen happens to the bad guys. Anyway, whatever.

That is my final word on this one: What. Ever.

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¹Though I did attempt to hide the cover -- which is truly, awesomely over-the-top, but also a tiny bit embarrassing if onlookers are unaware that it is deliberately over-the-top. Assuming that the publishers were going for deliberately over-the-top. God, I hope so. If not, I may have to weep for... something.

²Ha ha ha, get it? Get it? And her brother's name is Jonathan! And her great-grandmother, I suspect, was the original Mina, but their last name has changed slightly. That may actually have been mentioned in the book. I forget.

³There is some vampire backlash out there, right? It's not just me?

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Book source: Library copy.

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Comments

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Thank you for reading this so the rest of don't have to. Really.

Posted by: Colleen | 25 June 2010 at 05:49 AM

I don't know if the last few Cabot you read included Airhead, but I was surprised by how much I liked Airhead. The sequel fell a little flat, but I'm looking forward to reading the third book, Runaway, this summer. (Though I continue to think it's called Runway, what with the fashion model plot and all.)

Posted by: LaurieA-B | 25 June 2010 at 09:03 AM