Shelly's Book Blog

I know I said I was going to read Newbery winners -- and I am! -- but I had already bought Blue Bloods, by Melissa De La Cruz, so I decided to read that first. This is a vampire-themed story, similar to Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, but in this story the main characters are all very wealthy New York teens who attend a private school called Duchesne. Turns out most of them are vampires but the adults in their lives do not tell them so until their (the teens') bodies begin to change (a sort of vampire puberty that begins around the age of 15).

It seems that most of the vampires of this story believe they are immortal, but when one of them turns up dead, some of them suspect that they may be more vulnerable than they thought.

There is a lot of talk about fashion that I'm afraid went right over my head. The author often describes what the young women are wearing as though she were Joan Rivers introducing an Academy Award nominee coming down the red carpet. I don't even know if the names she drops so liberally are real designers or just made-up names for the story!

Time travel themes always intrigue me, so one part of this story I really liked was the idea that these people have memories of past lives. For example, while dancing in an historic building called "The American Society Mansion," Schuyler has flashbacks to dancing in that same place 100 years earlier. The music was Chopin instead of rap, and of course her clothes were very different, but she remembers being there in another lifetime. Some of the older characters have memories of settling the Plymouth colony in the 1600's and of ancient civilizations.

The penthouse-living, self-indulgent lifestyle of most of the teens was rather shocking. They seem to have a great deal of freedom -- smoking, drinking, going to clubs -- so much that they seem more like adults than high school students. The misfit trio (Schuyler, Dylan, and Oliver) are likeable, though, and it's fun to hate the arrogant, careless queen bee Mimi. I guess I'll call this one a guilty pleasure and probably read the second book in the series before I get back to the Newberys!