Blessed by Cynthia Leitich Smith

I have to say, I am both happy and sorely disappointed with the recent trend of vampire books.

On the one hand, there is Dracula, Blade, The Hunger, The Last Vampire, Lillith's Dream, Let the Right One In, Interview With the Vampire and Buffy.

On the other, there's Vampire Crush, Blue Bloods, Undead and Unwed, and, of course, The Twilight Saga. Now to add Blessed to the list.

It is my understanding that this book is the third in a series. However, this does not excuse the author from picking up immediately after what was clearly a very important and very convoluted scene.

Quincie P. Morris is the owner of the restaurant Sanguini's. However, the head chef, who, as part of the restaurant's new theme, played a blood-sucking vampire, turns out to be - SURPRISE! - a blood-sucking vampire. But don't worry, she's made a deal with him: if she can drink the blood of her werewolf boyfriend without killing him, then he'll leave her alone. It's the perfect plan, especially considering how trustworthy all villains are.

She succeeds, but unfortunately, the chef (Brad) has framed her boyfriend for murder, so he now has to leave town pronto. Cue depressing, sappy teenage angst. Keep in mind that Quincie is recently orphaned, but not to worry because her werewolf boyfriend's parents are happy to let her stay in her werewolf boyfriend's house and live in her werewolf boyfriend's room and sleep in her werewolf boyfriend's water bed (I'm not sure what the water bed has to do with anything, but they keep mentioning it so it must be important), because that's the best way to help her move on.

I also have to say that there are wereoppossums and werearmadillos in this story, which I find difficult to take seriously. It's like she intentionally sapped the whole scary out of werewolves.

Anyway, we of course can't leave our helpless neophyte vampiress protagonist on her own now that the eye candy has skipped town to join a werewolf pack. So how does the author solve this enormous problem? By bringing in more eye candy, obviously. Witty, charming, mysterious, strong, vampire-hunting, emotionally troubled, devastatingly handsome eye candy in the form of a guardian angel named Zachary. Because we all know how helpless vampires are, what with their eternal youth, heightened senses, super-human strength, and pointy fangs.

Conveniently, Zachary arrives with a vampire-savvy chef to replace Brad, and some other dude named Freddy who is supposedly important but doesn't have enough of a personality for me to remember him. (Please forgive my comma usage; it was inserted for the sake of clarity.)

Finally, we get to something of a plot. In this story, in order to become a vampire you only have to ingest a vampire's blood. OH, BY THE WAY - Brad's been sneaking his vampiric blood into a particular dish at Sanguini's. Which dish, you ask?

Chilled.
Baby.
Squirrels.

I don't know what kind of person eats chilled baby squirrels, but whoever they are, they're probably the kind of person who doesn't particularly mind being turned into a vampire anyway.

Moving on.

About a month after ingesting vampire blood, you become a vampire yourself. And since of course everyone's body reacts the exact same way in the exact same amount of time to different amounts of a substance, they can safely assume that the first wave of vampires will transform on October 11th, and not a minute before.

After enough Dracula references to make even the most devoted vampire fangirl's head spin, they finally figure out that the only way to save the soon-to-turn vampires is to kill Brad. Just like they do in Dracula. I wouldn't be so mad about this except that Quincie actually reads Dracula as research.

And still doesn't figure it out for another hundred pages.

Eventually, Quincie dresses up in her mother's wedding dress to seduce Brad, because of course in any vampire story, everybody is in love with the main character. And I so do not want to know what kind of wedding her mother had. Anyway, Quincie is somehow magically able to hold onto Zachary's holy sword without bursting into flames and slay Brad while the angel himself is MIA. But not before the tables turn and Brad seduces Quincie in front of her werewolf boyfriend.

All in all, it was a very strange story, and I would recommend it to all members of Team Jacob and anyone up for a good, 450-page laugh.