Tuesday, December 6, 2011
The Reformed Vampire Support Group by Catherine Jinks
So, you think you know everything there is to know about
vampires, right? They are sexy, fierce, and sophisticated, lusty, smoldering
and dangerous, and you even know one thing or two about how to defeat one.
After all, you’ve picked up a lot of good information from all the books you
have read. A stake through the heart, a crucifix in their snarling face, garlic
draped around your neck will do the trick of disintegrating any vampire out
into nothingness. Well, you are dead
wrong! Unless you are a vampire and want to avoid being staked for attacking
other people, you have to admit you have a problem and join a support group.
Meet Nina Harrison, a new addition to the vampire family.
Actually, she is no longer that new. Fanged at fifteen back in 1973 and still
living with her mother, Nina’s arrested development reveals an awkward teenage
body in a fifty one year old mind, and she defies anything there is to know
about vampires. Forever hungry and sick, she struggles to survive among us
humans without infecting anyone else and without being detected. Half the time,
she is nauseous, weak, tired and miserable. She spends her days locked up in
her mother’s basement to avoid being turned to ashes by sunlight, and at night….
Well, at night she does what every other teenager does…sometimes. Aside from
spending way too much time watching television sprawled on her couch, Nina is
also a published author and wants to set the record straight. Her fiction may
not be as popular as that of Stephenie Meyer, but then again, Nina does not
want to attract too much attention due to her, let’s just say, special
situation. The highlights of her life
are the Tuesday meetings of her support group when she joins a motley crew of
reformed vampires. Much like at an AA meeting, Nina sits in to listen or talk
about other people’s, uh, vampires’ problems. Led by Doctor Stanford Plackett,
the oldest and wisest of them all, Dave, George, Horace, Casimir, Gladys, and Bridget
get together to alleviate the loneliness of their existence and to come up with
new ideas about how to deal not only with the isolation, but also with the
indignities and the constant health problems they all face. After all, it is
very difficult to cope alone as a reformed vampire.
Their lives are as dull and depressing as it can get, until
one day when they discover Casimir turned to ashes in his coffin. Faced with
the terrifying possibility that all of them could be taken out one by one, Nina
decides to prove once and for all that not all vampires are such pathetic
losers. Along with Dave and Father Ramon, the human priest that caters to their
needs during daytime, Nina embarks on a long journey into the Australian Outback
to discover at the end of the trail an even more terrifying situation. Could
she resist temptation and not succumb to the blood lust?
A Top Ten 2010 Best Book for Young Adults winner, Catherine Jinks’ The Reformed Vampire Support Group
published by Harcourt/Houghton Mifflin is a suspenseful mystery that would be
gobbled up in no time by a ravenous high school crowd of readers. Not only the
novel provides the entertaining value of the typical vampire books, but also it
does so with a tongue and cheek, self-deprecating humor. Nina’s teenage awkwardness
reverberates with any of today’s issues faced by young adults. Acceptance of
one’s identity without admitting defeat and at the same time finding your place
to belong appears to be the underlying theme of the novel. Just because you are a sick vampire who has to
take enzyme supplements to curtail the digestive cramps you suffer from does
not mean you cannot lead a normal life. The novel’s well-paced action is
peppered with some slower and somewhat superfluous scenes perhaps to reveal
that just like real life, a vampire’s existence is not all that is cracked up
to be. The setting is rather dark and
depressing, especially when Nina reveals the gory details of their eating
habits, including the fact that they all have to clean up after themselves in
order to avoid the wrath of her non vampire mother. After all, if Nina would have listened to her
mother and avoided the party that fateful night when she got drunk, she would
not have gotten herself into such a conundrum. All in all, the novel tackles
some deep and dark issues without talking down or preaching to its audience.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
A point has been made about Nina listening to her mother and avoiding the party where she got drunk and forced to deal with the situation she has everyday since. How do we know her becoming a vampire wasn't her fate? Maybe this night was they way her story was written long before being born? Maybe her "fate" was to not listen to her mother and to go to the party? In my mind, everything -fiction or non - happens because it was supposed to, not because anybody wanted it to.
I will read this book. Good job.
Post a Comment