Fat Vampire

I bought this audiobook under the assumption I'd chosen the Johnny Truant book by the same name.

The first 1/3 to 1/2 of this book was good - a variety of characters who feel like they have secrets and motivations. Until you get to the end of the book and most of the characters never actually do anything.

What the hell was Sejal even there for? She's apparently there to provide a potential love interest for Doug, and it feels like there's a real secret she has... but that just doesn't go anywhere. She felt pasted in as an afterthought.

Out of interest, at this point, I did a quick scroll through reviews on other sites, and I'm not alone in thinking the first half was pretty good.

This is probably closer to a 2.5 but I'm feeling generous.

This also got better once I switched from reading this to the audiobook version. But, the narrator sounds like the undead himself, so I had to speed this up to 1.5x to make it listenable.

I understand why people gave this low stars. The protag was unfocused - so much so that one of the characters even points out at the end that sometimes he acts like the hero and sometimes he acts like the victim. The plotline about the vampire hunter tv show was unnecessary. And it seemed like the author didn't know how to end this, and just gave us a myriad of "alternate" endings in the hopes that one of them would satisfy readers. I'm glad to have finally gotten this off of my TBR, but it wasn't worth the wait.

Its a pretty good book, just not a great book for me.

I really enjoyed the beginning of the book. I loved the characters and the development, and the issues. There is really nothing about the first half I didn't like. Admittedly I found the whole teenage love/lust stuff really hitting a bit too close to home, but I can imagine the author went through the same things.

Sadly the second half.. I didn't like how mean the main character got. How mean he was to other people. The whole "who turned me" mystery never felt like a mystery to the reader. All clues really lead one way, then near the end it was obvious you were lead astray.

The book turned out to be more of a thriller than a nice story than I would like (and I like thrillers).