Blandula...

Christmastime is here...and everything seems to be insane. Or, more correctly, my kids are fucking insane. The H-Bomb is 3 1/2 now, and totally clued into the whole Santa/toy equation, and he neeeeeeds everything that he sees. This is why I love PBS. No commercials. Seriously, his head may explode by the time we actually hit December 25. The Destroyer, on the other hand, is pretty clueless, but I think the fever's catching. She's just off the wall, and if she's not endlessly screaming "Mam," "Mam" over and over, she's hitting her head against the wall or the floor, just to watch Mommy shriek in horror. Plus, the hubby's home and hogging the computer. All this means I barely have time to blog hop, much less comment or write my own posts.

I have been reading, though. I'm on a vamp kick. I finished Vamps and the City by Kerrelyn Sparks. This is the second in a series, though the first one that I've read. I read the first couple of pages in the library and thought, "This'll do. Looks like a cute vampire romcom." And that pretty much sums it up. This is the kind of book you read when you're waiting for something really good to come out, and you just want something to pass the time.

The heroine is Darcy Newhart, a former tv reporter who was turned five years before. She hates being a vampire and doesn't think much of the vampire world. But for some reason, she was in the harem of Roman Draganesti, the hero of the first book in the series, who is the head of the "good" faction of vampires, known as the Vamps. Which is kind of dorky. If you were a vampire, would you rather be known as one of the Vamps, or the Malcontents (the bad guys)? The Malcontents is a much cooler gang name. Anyhow, I don't know why this guy had a harem, but now that he's married a human, Darcy and the other ladies are out on their butts. So Darcy manages to talk the head of the vampire television network into giving her a reality show, in which the former harem ladies choose the sexiest man on Earth. As a twist, she decides to secretly enter some humans in the competition. Adam Something (oops, I already returned the book) is a human with psychic abilities who is part of a top secret government team called the Stake-Out team (c'mon now!), which hunts vampires. Adam is a dedicated vampire slayer, until he spots Darcy, and falls head over heels in lust, though he can't believe she's a Vamp. So when the Stake-Out team (groan) catches wind of this show, Adam gets himself on it. Love and kinda boring hijinks ensue.

This book reminds me of the vampire romances of Lyndsey Sands: nice, but bland characters, bland love story and a few small chuckles. It was okay, but nothing special. Darcy and Adam were okay, but I just found their story to be boring. No sparks (Ugh! Bad pun.) It was just they see each other, they fall in lust at first sight, then all of a sudden they're in lurve, but they can't be together because she's a vampire, blah, blah blah. I just didn't feel the tension or urgency. The romance, y'know what I mean? There was nothing new here, no interesting twist on the vampire mythology. It felt very by the numbers to me. I almost didn't finish, not because I hated it, but just because I was bored. The only thing that kept me reading was the reality tv show scenes with the other vampire harem ladies. The other ladies are firmly rooted in their respective pasts: a Medieval princess, a Civil War era Southern Belle, a Regency Miss, among others. They have no concept of an independent life. They provided the amusing moments as they finally enter the twenty first century and learn to take control of their own destinies. I wanted to find out what would happen to them.

This wasn't a bad book, just a bland one. If you like light vampires, or Lyndsey Sands, you might enjoy it. It just didn't do it for me, because I couldn't get into the love story. But next up, we have A Hunger Like No Other by Kresley Cole. You wanna talk tension and urgency? That one's got it in spades.