Blue Bloods -- Melissa de la Cruz

While I loved the textured bite marks on the cover of Blue Bloods, that's about all the book has going for it.

You know how there are some movies -- say, The Crap-ft, for instance -- that regardless of their supreme suckdom, can still be watchable?  Not only watchable, but that can carry along some sort of horrible compulsion to watch?  I know that every single time I've run across that movie re-running yet again, I end up watching the whole thing.  I know I'm not the only one.  I can't be.

Anyway.  I tried to stop reading this stupid book.  Every couple of chapters, I'd turn to Josh and say, "Okay.  I'm done.  This is so lame.  I'm getting another book."  Then I'd read a bit more and something vaguely interesting would happen and I'd end up reading another couple of chapters before repeating myself yet again.  Don't tell him I said this, but I have a very patient husband.

I would have hated the book less if I'd been able to put it down the first time I got irritated.

Granted, I should have known.  I should have known that I would not enjoy a vampire novel written by the author of The Au Pairs.  I mean, really.  So I have no one but myself to blame.  I'm going to take it out on the book anyway.  Spoilers ahead.

• By the end of the first page, I knew that the description was a tad much for my taste -- personally, I tend to enjoy spare more than flowery.  But I chalked that up to the genre -- I figured she was going for urban-gothic-horror, and as we all know, whenever you chuck gothic into the mix, adjectives are bound to start getting tossed around willy-nilly.  Also, I occasionally do try to be objective.  Occasionally.  (In case you haven't noticed, I gave up this time.) 

• Advertisers will be happy to know that the change of genre hasn't decreased the number of brand name appearances -- even though the main character shops at thrift stores, the product placement is rampant.

• Page 10, and I gave up trying to like the main character and her best friend:  "They finished each other's sentences and liked to read aloud from random pages of Infinite Jest when they were bored."  Again with the lack of objectivity -- I haven't even read Infinite Jest, but I've never failed to be irritated by its fans.  So Schuyler and Oliver immediately arrive (in my head) in The Land of Obnoxious and Privileged Pretentious Teenagers.  Sigh.  The only person I'm hurting is myself.  I really should have stopped reading.

• The other two main characters?  Jack and Mimi Force.  Twins.  His name is JACK FORCE.  What is he, a superhero?  A future American Gladiator?  Why not name him John Black and get it over with?  Yes, yes, Jack is his nickname, but still.  I shuddered every single time I read his name.

• Want to know where vampires come from?  They're fallen angels.  GAG.  The whole riff on that just made me think of that episode of Buffy with the vampire worshippers.  The scene where Jack Force (Can't you just hear some sort of sound effect after you read his name?) finds out that his father is in fact the archangel Michael.  That was just... yeah.

Add to that:  I didn't care about the characters, the descriptions felt forced and overdone (even accounting for my taste), the dialogue was flat and occasionally bone-stupid, and the fact that the whole book is obviously the first in a planned series of many...  That last bit was the last straw for me.  I'm not even going to try and find something nice to say about a book that was written purely to be a marketable product.

Of course, the reader reviews at Amazon completely disagree with me, so maybe I'm just a crab.