Brief book review: Friday Night Bites

[terriko]

Friday Night Bites by Chloe Neill

Twitter-sized review: Too much romance and not enough friendship in my vampire smut? I may be doing this wrong.

Longer notes: This is the second in the series that started with Some Girls Bite. Part of what I liked about the first book was the dynamic between Merit and her friends, but sadly this is the (apparently inevitable) part of supernatural fiction where the main character starts to get kinda obsessed with Big Sexy Vampire and starts ignoring her friends. So while I enjoyed knowing what happened next, I'm disappointed by how far in the background the secondary characters got pushed so she could brood over her boss. Now, that's not to say that the plot didn't drive forwards and we've learned some more interesting stuff about the politics of the supes here... And it kept the tension up rather than devolving into nothing but fanged make-outs. But it just wasn't what I was hoping to get out of the series, and it lost some of what made this series rise above the rest of the genre. I want my fictional women to have friends, darnit!

Of course, Merit still does have some of her friends despite how she treated them this book, so I'm hoping that this is just the necessary conflict to strengthen the friendships later, and the next novel will be more awesome.

Comments

[reverie-realization.blogspot.com]

That may have been one of my major issues with the Twilight series that I couldn't really put my finger on - main characters who obsess over their love to the point of ditching all other relationships SUCK (no pun intended) and become very one-dimensional.

You may be interested in trying Marissa Day (pen name of Sarah Zettel) in the romance genre. It's not vampires, but I think she said something about wizards and fairies in Victorian-ish London. (I met her at the sci fi con we just went to. The "sex" scene she read from her first Marissa Day book was stellar.)

[terriko]

*laugh* I'm not particularly attached to vampires. In fact, I kinda hate vampire romance at times because it's got such a penchant for over-controlling male leads which is not my thing. But sometimes it's got amazing female leads, and I like that there's usually some interesting politics involved when you have very different social structures. So this sounds like it'd be right up my alley. Thanks for the recommendation!