Tag Archives: Vampires

Review: City of Bones by Cassandra Clare

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City of Bones by Cassandra ClareCity of Bones (The Mortal Instruments #1)
Cassandra Clare
Margaret K. McElderry Books
Published March 27, 2007

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When fifteen-year-old Clary witnesses a murder, she is determined to find out what’s happening. Unfortunately, she’s the only person who can see the perpetrators and the victim literally disappeared post-mortem. As she tries to reconcile herself to the strange happenings, she encounters one of the vicious youths again, only to discover that he belongs to an elite and mysterious group called Shadowhunters who protect ordinary mortals (which they call mundies, or mundanes) from demons. What they still aren’t sure about is why Clary can see them.

Before they can figure it out, however, Clary’s mother is kidnapped, and Clary is wounded by a poisonous demon. Jace, Clary’s newfound demon-hunting friend rescues her and brings her back to the Institute. There Clary learns about the history of Shadowhunters and about the ruthless former Shadowhunter who will torture her mother until she reveals the location of the Mortal Cup. The only way to stop him is to find the Cup first, but the location is buried in memories Clary has been forced to forget. Jace and Clary set out in a race to unlock her memories and find the Cup before it’s too late.

In a series opener that’s tough to put down, Clare introduces a hidden world within the familiar landscape of New York City. The story rockets off to a quick start, leaving readers scrambling to turn pages. Snappy dialogue and imaginative creatures spring from nearly every scene. There were a few moments in which characters’ behavior was a little incongruous with the rest of Clare’s descriptions of them, but overall, this is a high-action story of drama and heart worth the time it takes to cross from cover to cover.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
Moderate/infrequent.

Sexual Content
Clary battles a strong attraction to the mysterious Jace, and the two share a couple of intense lip-locked moments, but nothing beyond that physically.

Spiritual Content
Clary and Jace briefly discuss whether Jace believes in God. After all, the existence of Shadowhunters is based on a story involving an angel, and they have been tasked with killing demons. Jace doesn’t think this adds up to the existence of real angels, demons, or God.

Violence
One expects a bit of violence in a book about hunting demons, and Clare doesn’t disappoint. Clary and her newfound allies face no shortage of monsters, and a few are not so pretty, but over-all fairly brief in description of their dispatch.

Drug Content
For her birthday, Clary visits a Goth club known for access to drugs and alcohol. She and her best friend Simon do not participate in these activities. At a party filled with supernatural guests, Simon ingests a strange drink with rather catastrophic results.

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Review: Perverse by Larry Rodness

Book Review and Content, Paranormal, Young Adult/Teen 12-18, , , ,

Perverse
Larry Rodness
ITOH Press
Published December 31, 2012

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As a second generation Goth, even Gothic life for Emylene is weird. Not weird. Perverse! While she enjoys her position in her community as a Goth princess, she doesn’t always see her spoiled and self-centered behavior and how it impacts others. When she inadvertently frees a mysterious girl from a charcoal sketch found in a dismal antique shop, Emylene’s world begins to shift. Her parents are barely recognizable and what’s the deal with her friends at her nightly club hangout?

Too late, Emylene realizes her new friend is not what she seems. As events spiral out of control, Emylene finds new allies to face the terror she is partly responsible for releasing. It will take all their strength and cunning to stop the creatures controlling her hometown.

Rodness creates a complex and feisty young girl with smarts and spunk in spades. Emylene grapples with her newfound adulthood and its challenges in familiar and entertaining ways. Narrative and plot are not as well-constructed as the characters, however. The narrative wanders out of one point of view and into another without ceremony or pattern. Scattered rants about the misconceptions the mainstream population has about the gothic community were sometimes off-putting rather than insightful. One character hijacks the story and inserts a long (several chapters) narrative of his own. Still, Rodness uses some interesting bits of folklore and introduces readers to a strange magical picture, creating a story world worthy of the genre.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
Moderate profanity.

Sexual Content
References (without description) to some teen sexual experimentation girl-on-girl. In one scene, Emylene is incapacitated by a villain and made to experience sexual pleasure. She is later found by a young man who fantasizes about having sex with her, whether or not she is willing. Other brief references to aberrant sexual practices.

Spiritual Content
Brief mention of solstice celebrations and Wiccan traditions.

Violence
Some brief scenes of fatal violence.

Drug Content
References to bad parts of town including drug trafficking, but no drug use among characters.

Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

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Review: The Immortal Rules by Julie Kagawa

Book Review and Content, Dystopian or Post-Apocalyptic, Paranormal, Young Adult/Teen 12-18, , , , , ,

The Immortal Rules
Julie Kagawa
Harlequin Teen
Published April 24, 2012

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In a world ruled by vampires, Allison Sekemoto survives by staying hidden and scavenging for food. When hunger forces her to venture outside the safety of home, she is attacked and offered a choice: to die or become what she hates most. A vampire.

Allie struggles to learn vampire ways and accept and what her new form means to the humans she has left behind. Another attack forces her to flee from the city and into the wild where she will be stalked by rabids, diseased and deadly creatures. But Allie isn’t the only one braving those wilds. In the night, she comes upon a group of humans on a quest to find a legendary city. A safe haven for humans. A city without vampires. Allie vows to protect them on their journey, but can she really succeed when the deadliest threat is her own hunger?

Kagawa sends her readers plummeting through a masterfully woven plot into a post-apocalyptic world in which humans are ruled by vampires and stalked by rabids. While heroine Allie seems cold-hearted and indifferent at the story’s opening, it is in her vampire form that she develops love for others, creating an intriguing paradox.

Language Content
No F-bombs, but other curses peppered throughout.

Sexual Content
Insinuations, but no graphic content.

Spiritual Content
Allison encounters a group who are people of faith. Precisely what they believe isn’t deeply explored, but faith is portrayed as a very admirable and positive thing, even if such optimism is hard for Allison to understand. In Kagawa’s world, vampires may be either good or evil, depending on their relationship with the living. They will either abuse and dominate or perhaps struggle to check their power and thirst and protect humans.

Violence
Lots of violence. Creatures called rabids, human and animal, viciously pursue and devour any they can capture. Some references to past torture.

Drug Content
Random guy drinks a beer.

Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

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My Thoughts on Twilight and The Graveyard Book

Young Adult/Teen 12-18, , , , , , , , ,

Poll Question: Should Christian teens read books about characters of spritually questionable origin?

  • Maybe. Mature kids can discern the truth without being spiritually compromised. Other kids aren’t ready. (4 votes)
  • Yes. Reading about a vampire doesn’t do any harm. It’s just fantasy! (2 votes)
  • No way. The origin of vampires isn’t “questionable.” It’s evil. Don’t even go there. (2 votes)

My Vote
I’ll be honest– this is a tricky one for me. When I began this blog and posted my first poll, a friend left several comments on my facebook account about teen fiction and what it should and should not contain and she said two very key words: age-appropriate. (maybe that’s technically one word, hyphenated…)

I think there’s something to that. Absolutely. In the case of Neil Gaiman’s book, we’re talking about a story set in a graveyard with a small child as a character. (I’m so resisting the urge to revisit that too often quoted line from the movie that will haunt Haley Joel Osmet for the rest of his life.) I’m not sure this is what I’d call appropriate content for middle grade readers. It’s an intensely dark story. (A beautifully written one, but dark nonetheless.) I mean let’s talk reality here for one second– kid grows up in a graveyard, raised by ghosts… anyone see a complex coming for little Bod? Okay, I know, it’s just fiction…(I’m the girl who loved the movie Meet Joe Black, but came away at the end thinking, dude, that guy is going to have one serious complex.)

But I know for myself, as a young reader, stories inspired me and even to a degree became a part of me in a deeper way than my reading does today. I think young readers moreso than older ones tend to idolize the characters they read about. Does reading The Graveyard Book encourage a fascination with death and the dead?

Here’s another interesting thought from a blog I read this morning. She blogged concerning Bella and Edward’s relationship and its similarities to abusive/co-dependent relationships. Is this a relationship we want teens to emulate?

Honestly, I think the romance genre itself often does a poor job presenting a healthy view of a romantic relationship. I have seen it even in Christian fiction. But that’s another topic altogether!

One of the things I liked about the Twilight series is that purity was important to Edward and that he and Bella waited until their marriage to consumate their relationship. In a culture where sexual purity is so out of style, it was exciting to me to see a YA series promoting abstinence take the bestseller list by storm.

Review: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Book Review and Content, Middle Grade 8-12, Paranormal, , , , , , ,

The Graveyard Book
Neil Gaiman
HarperCollins
Published September 30, 2008

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They say it takes a town to raise a child. Or in this case, a graveyard.

After his family are murdered by a stranger named Jack, a toddler escapes to a graveyard where he is adopted by a pair of ghosts who name him Nobody. A vampire speaks up as Bod’s guardian, eventually sharing this responsibility with a werewolf.  Bod befriends other ghost children and even a witch buried on unconsecrated ground near the graveyard. But the mysterious man who murdered his family still seeks him and intends to finish the task he set out to do the night Bod came to live in the graveyard. Bod and his friends must find out who this man is and why he is determined to kill Bod before it’s too late.

Neil Gaiman recently received the Newberry medal for The Graveyard Book and has also been nominated for the Hugo award. The characters are well-crafted, memorable and endearing, but the story is very dark. I found it so easy to care for Bod and root for him throughout the story. It’s a pretty quick read with illustrations throughout. Sensitive readers might find the dark elements to be too intense. See below for other content information.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
None

Sexual Content
None

Spiritual Content
Ghosts, ghouls, a vampire, werewolf, and a witch are included in the story’s cast of characters and save Bod from harm. Bod literally lives among the crypts and tombs of the graveyard and spends most of his life among the dead (and undead?).

Violent Content
The story opens after a man has murdered Bod’s parents and sibling. While the murders themselves are not graphically described, the killer is cold, complacent about their deaths, even the death of the other child. He intends to kill Bod as well, though he is only six months old at the time. While not graphic, the nature of those intentions seemed harsh to me.

Drug Content
None

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Review: Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer

Book Review and Content, Paranormal, Young Adult/Teen 12-18, , , , , , , ,

Breaking Dawn
Stephanie Meyer
Little, Brown & Company
Published August 7, 2007

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At last– the moment Twilight fans have dreamed of: Edward and Bella marry and retreat to a private island for a honeymoon. When it becomes obvious that Bella is pregnant– and with an extraordinary child– the couple returns home to care for Bella and possibly even protect her from the child in her womb. But the only way to save Bella may be to transform her.

When the dreaded Volturi close in on the Cullen Family, presumably to kill the child, Bella commits to do whatever it takes to protect the child she saw in her dreams. As the battle looms nearer, it becomes clear to Bella that she has more strength than even she gave herself credit for. But will it be enough to protect her new family from total destruction?

This was my least favorite book in the series. I will say that at last, we see Bella find her own strength, and that was a cool twist. But instead of it happening in an interesting and hard-won way, she kind of just eases into victory almost without realizing she’s doing anything incredible. So that part wasn’t so cool.

Edward and Bella finally have their long-awaited consummation of their romance, and that takes some time and is a bit ridiculous what with Edward’s crazy strength kind of out of control. Bella’s pregnancy is kind of weird, too. Honestly, some of the vampire story rules got too weird for me at that point, because it gets into what the risks are of her carrying a child who’s only part-vampire and is that even possible? My favorite description of the book (though it does contain some spoilers) comes from a spoof commercial advertising a Twilight Edition of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. It’s pretty crazy, but it kind of sums up some of my feelings on the story.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
There was a little bit more swearing in this novel compared to the first. Light bordering moderate.

Sexual Content
So now that Edward and Bella are married, the party is on. Meyer does a fair job keeping the details of Bella and Edward’s sex life strictly between them. Hints about it are dropped, and the room is damaged due to Edward’s super-strength, but there’s no play by play description of the events that occur.

A bond forms between the baby and one of the werewolves, and because of her age, it’s a little strangely creepy. The characters maintain that it’s an imprint, kind of a betrothal type matching deal, that’s not sexual in any way, but I still found it to be a little weird.

Spiritual Content
Largely the same as the other Twilight books. The Edward Cullen and his family are “good” vampires who’ve chosen only to feed on animals, not humans. They are at odds with the “bad” vampires who consider themselves superior to the human race and still kill/bite people. Werewolves emerge to protect the people of Forks, WA.

Violent Content
The Volturi are as ruthless as ever, destroying one vampire in the midst of a conflict. The baby emerging from Bella is a bit graphic and bloody– it’s not the usual birth experience.

Drug Content
None.

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