Angela Korra'ti reviewed The Dead Girls' Dance (The Morganville Vampires, Book 2) by Rachel Caine (Morganville Vampires (2))
None
3 stars
Since I do loves me some , one of the things I managed to do while I was ill was chug through the first two books of her YA series, The Morganville Vampires. Also, I was curious to see how one of the authors I'm regularly reading writes YA in case I ever get the urge to try to do it myself.
There are two books in the series so far, Glass Houses and The Dead Girls' Dance. They really read rather like episodes 1 and 2 of a Buffy-style TV series, and since the principle characters are all young college kids, that really upped the Buffyesque feel of the whole thing. In fact, the only things that kept it from being hugely Buffyesque were that 1) the lead character, Claire, is way brainier than Buffy ever was, and 2) Claire and her love interest don't actually ever …
Since I do loves me some , one of the things I managed to do while I was ill was chug through the first two books of her YA series, The Morganville Vampires. Also, I was curious to see how one of the authors I'm regularly reading writes YA in case I ever get the urge to try to do it myself.
There are two books in the series so far, Glass Houses and The Dead Girls' Dance. They really read rather like episodes 1 and 2 of a Buffy-style TV series, and since the principle characters are all young college kids, that really upped the Buffyesque feel of the whole thing. In fact, the only things that kept it from being hugely Buffyesque were that 1) the lead character, Claire, is way brainier than Buffy ever was, and 2) Claire and her love interest don't actually ever have sex. Not for lack of interest, but more simply because Claire is only 16 and said love interest (quite wisely) wants to avoid getting either of them in trouble. I had to give Caine points for that, because she certainly made the almost-sex scenes quite spark-a-rific even without actual sex. And I give her points as well for her handling of the vampires--not because she's doing anything unusual with how she writes vamps, but more because she gives the head vamp some interestingly murky motivations.
So yeah. The books are super-short--apparently, at least for Caine, YA pretty much amounts to 'write a story that's shorter than my non-YA novels and keep out any possibility of sex'. Otherwise, they showed the same delightful pacing that her Weather Warden books do, and I was vaguely disappointed that each one was over so quickly. If you tackle the first, go ahead and buy the second as well. Three stars.
