Review: No Beautiful Brooding Vamps Here
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 21, 2014
I’ve read other books by this author and enjoyed them. Stake You grabbed my attention because of the cool cover and title. The story didn’t grip me at first, but I kept reading and before the halfway mark, I was anxious to find out how it would all pan out for the heroine, Dev.We guess that the creepy new boy at school is a vampire from the very start. Dev describes him as an Edward Cullen wannabe who wears sunglasses indoors, and pretty soon he has a vulnerable girl under his spell.Dev (full name Devlin O’ Mara), our protagonist, is a tough girl. She’s had it hard looking after her alcoholic mother for the past number of years and spends most of her time outside of school working long hours at a pub to pay the bills and put food on the table. It’s clear something bad happened in her past with one of her mother’s loser exes, but Dev doesn’t talk about it, or let herself think back too much. She’s closed off, even from her boyfriend, Deco, and close friends.Her other love interest is Base, a decent, attractive guy with family problems of his own. These two should be together. The reader knows it, Base knows it, and Dev pretends not to know it. Grr, if only I was at that school to sort those kids out. Dev resists her feelings for Base because of a lie her bitchy friend, Shauna, told her years ago. Now the thing I couldn’t understand was that Dev knows exactly what kind of trouble making cow her friend is. She must realise Shauna lied to her about Base… Anyway, I suppose I’m looking at all this high school drama through my grown-up eyes rather than a teenager’s.Moving on to our villain. Sully is a creep. He scratches at windows, preying on vulnerable girls who’ve had trouble in their life. He seeks out who he calls “broken girls” feeding off their pain, adding a new dimension to vampires. Dev isn’t so easily entranced, however. Sully may be a vampire in this book, but he’s a metaphor for the type of abusive man who controls the woman in his life with fear. Sully is a slimy, repulsive being, the kind of guy who enjoys making his girlfriend feel weak and dependent on him, cutting her off from other people.Stake You is quite a dark read for a Young Adult book with a vampire. Dev’s homelife is just awful, and Base doesn’t have it much better. They’re both far too responsible and burdened down for people their age. Dev and Base’s investigation of Sully is the most interesting aspect of the novel, for the simple reason that together, these two characters are compelling. I wouldn’t mind spending more time with them. ****There’s nothing beautiful or sexy about vampires in this book, and as such, it stands out from the crowd.