Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Vampires!

Ok, so who DOESN'T love a good vampire novel? I know that I do, and my favourite series at the moment (and for the past couple of years) is the Twilight Series, by Stephenie Meyer. This series includes:











Twilight














Eclipse




and









New Moon





Here's the basic premise, taken from the author's, Stephenie Meyer, website:
"TWILIGHT tells the story of 17-year-old Bella Swan who moves to the small town of Forks, Washington to live with her father, and becomes drawn to Edward, a pale, mysterious classmate who seems determined to push her away. But neither can deny the attraction that pulls them together... even when Edward confides that he and his family are vampires. Their unorthodox romance puts her in physical danger when Edward's nemesis comes to town and sets his sights on Bella."

The two subsequent novels tell of their deepening relationship and the dangers that continue to surround Bella, a mortal who knows too much about the undead. The 4th and final novel, Breaking Dawn, is scheduled for release on August 2, 2008.


The Carlyle Fraser Library owns all three of the first three novels in the series and will OF COURSE pre-order Breaking Dawn!
In other Twilight-related news, I read that the Twilight movie is in production!









Kristen Stewart has been cast as Bella Swan.























Robert Pattinson has been cast as Edward (If he looks familiar, think Cedric Diggory from "Harry Potter").




Here are a few other vampire novels that I've enjoyed. The CFL owns them all, so if you're interested, stop by and check them out! (Reviews courtesy of Amazon.com)

Blue Bloods, by Melissa De la Cruz
From School Library Journal
De la Cruz has revamped traditional vampire lore in this story featuring a group of attractive, privileged Manhattan teens who attend a prestigious private school. Schuyler Van Alen, 15, the last of the line in a distinguished family, is being raised by her distant and forbidding grandmother. Schuyler, her friend Oliver, and their new friend Dylan are treated like outsiders by the clique of popular, athletic, and beautiful teens made up of Mimi Force, her twin brother, and her best friend. What they have in common is the fact that they are all Blue Bloods, or vampires. They don't realize that they aren't normal until they reach age 15. Then the symptoms manifest themselves and they begin to crave raw meat, have nightmares about events in history, and get prominent blue veins in their arms. Their immortality and way of life are threatened after Blue Blood teens start getting murdered by a splinter group called the Silver Bloods.

The Silver Kiss
by Annette Curtis Klause
From Publishers Weekly
Zoe is 16 and facing bereavement: her mother is dying of cancer, and her father seems to be excluding her from her mother's hospital bedside. No one dares speak to Zoe about the family tragedy, and she is isolated by grief, anger and fear. Then she meets the alluring, enigmatic Simon ("His eyes were dark, full of wilderness and stars"), who has an uncanny ability to recognize her feelings. After a series of nocturnal meetings, Zoe learns that Simon is a vampire kept alive by his thirst to avenge the death of his own mother three centuries ago. Drawn to him by an empathy charged with both longing and fear, Zoe agrees to participate in a dangerous scheme to trap Simon's mother's supernatural killer. The two emerge from their encounter able to mourn and acknowledge their losses. First-novelist Klause is excessively ambitious in her juggling of genres and themes; as a result, her suspense is uneven, her love story inadequately rooted and her resolution just a bit pat. Nevertheless, the use of the vampire figure to exorcise Zoe's complex feelings and often striking prose attest to an intelligent and original eye.

The Historian: A Novel
by Elizabeth Kostova
If your pulse flutters at the thought of castle ruins and descents into crypts by moonlight, you will savor every creepy page of Elizabeth Kostova's long but beautifully structured thriller The Historian. The story opens in Amsterdam in 1972, when a teenage girl discovers a medieval book and a cache of yellowed letters in her diplomat father's library. The pages of the book are empty except for a woodcut of a dragon. The letters are addressed to: "My dear and unfortunate successor." When the girl confronts her father, he reluctantly confesses an unsettling story: his involvement, twenty years earlier, in a search for his graduate school mentor, who disappeared from his office only moments after confiding to Paul his certainty that Dracula--Vlad the Impaler, an inventively cruel ruler of Wallachia in the mid-15th century--was still alive. The story turns out to concern our narrator directly because Paul's collaborator in the search was a fellow student named Helen Rossi (the unacknowledged daughter of his mentor) and our narrator's long-dead mother, about whom she knows almost nothing. And then her father, leaving just a note, disappears also.

--
Kimberley Barker

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