Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side by Beth Fantaskey - Book Review #18

Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side

by Beth Fantaskey

The undead can really screw up your senior year ...

Marrying a vampire definitely doesn’t fit into Jessica Packwood’s senior year “get-a-life” plan. But then a bizarre (and incredibly hot) new exchange student named Lucius Vladescu shows up, claiming that Jessica is a Romanian vampire princess by birth—and he’s her long-lost fiancé. Armed with newfound confidence and a copy of Growing Up Undead: A Teen Vampire’s Guide to Dating, Health, and Emotions, Jessica makes a dramatic transition from average American teenager to glam European vampire princess. But when a devious cheerleader sets her sights on Lucius, Jess finds herself fighting to win back her wayward prince, stop a global vampire war—and save Lucius’s soul from eternal destruction.

I didn’t have any expectations towards this book. I wasn’t even planning to read it, not because I was thinking it is going to be bad, but because I had no interest in this book whatsoever. However, I picked it up on the wave of my “give it a chance” program. Once in a while I’m trying books that I don’t have any interest in, but I heard a lot of good reviews from different people.

This book turned out to be not what I was thinking it will be. I thought it would be a comedy, maybe even a sarcastic story, mocking all the vampire craziness going on in YA book industry. But Jessica’s Guide turned out to be just another romantic paranormal, vampire love story, with a small exception. If not for this exception, I wouldn’t probably like it at all.

The exception that made this book worth reading for me was Lucius, an exchange student from Romania, a.k.a. vampire, and not Lucius himself precisely, but his letters to his uncle. Oh, those letters… I was waiting for them throughout the book. I wasn’t really reading everything else - I was skimming, just to get the idea what was happening and then read Lucius interpretation of event in his letters. His sometimes shocked, sometimes admirable observations of U.S. and American life style was not only funny as hell, they were also cute and adorable.

I would probably liked this book more, if it would be written from Lucius point of view and in more comical rather than romantic perspective. Nevertheless I still found it worth reading.