Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Review: The Dead Girl's Dance by Rachel Caine


The Dead Girl's Dance
(The Morganville Vampires - Book Two)
Rachel Caine

My Rating: ♥♥♥♥♥

Description:

Claire has her share of challenges. Like being a genius in a school that favors beauty over brains; homicidal girls in her dorm, and finding out that her college town is overrun with the living dead. On the up side, she has a new boyfriend with a vampire-hunting dad. But when a local fraternity throws the Dead Girls' Dance, hell is really going to break loose.


My Review:

I'm just going to start this review by coming out and admitting that by the time I finished the second book in the series I had completely and utterly fallen in love with The Morganville Vampires.

It's violent, dark and doesn't butcher the vampire mythology like so many other books and series do in this genre. In a lot of ways it also reminds me of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, not that they're vampire ~slayers~ but the political elements of the things that go bump in the night and the scooby-gang feel to Claire, Eve, Shawn and Michael's little group.

Despite the summary, and the title, this book actually has very little to do with the Dead Girl's dance hosted by the EEK frat. Claire's invited at the start of the book and the actual party only makes up less than two chapters and isn't exactly relevant to the main plot.

Which is Shawn's vampire slaying father showing up in town, which ultimately causes Shawn to get blamed for a vampire murder and sentenced to death by fire. We get filled in on Shawn's time outside of Morganville and what happened to his mother along with growth within his relationship with Claire.

The relationship between Shawn and Claire also continues to be one of my favorite elements of the series. They're slowly making their way to being one of my favorite couples in the ya genre. It's not 'omg-most-realistic-romance-ever!' but it doesn't sugarcoat the issues they have (especially with her jailbait status and the fact they want to have sex, yay for teens having hormones).

Like I mentioned earlier, the book also continues to be violent and dark. Which is obviously not everyone's cup of tea but I love it. I just personally believe any book that involves monsters should include at least some senseless blood and gore. I'm old fashioned like that.

I also like the fact that the book doesn't present a black-and-white depiction of who is good and who is evil. There are human's in the book who do evil things, for no real reason. Along with vampire's actions and morals, for a lack of a better word. For example, in terms of contracts the vampires have human's sign that make them their slaves? It's pointed out that most of them come from a time where "owning" slaves or you servants was extremely common. It doesn't make it right, but it weakens the wrong or evil element.

In conclusion: I'm in love with this book and it was a improvement over Glass Houses. I'm looking forward to the third book in the series.

If you want to read my review for the first book in the series, Glass Houses, click here.

6 comments:

The Book Bug said...

Ahhh, I can identrigy with yoyu about this. I guess I should warn you that these books are addictive. Fab review, Morganville is one of my favourite series ever!

ck.twilighter (Chasity) said...

Excellent review!! This series is on my TBR list! In fact, I own a book or 2 in the series already but I just dont have the time!!


Enjoy the rest of the series and I hope it keeps up to your likes!

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