Paranormalcy -- Kiersten White

Vampires are the opposite of scary. Her best friend is a mermaid and she sleeps with iron dumbbells in her bed to keep the faeries away. Everything she knows about high school has been deduced from the CW.

Even though Evie has been working full-time for the International Paranormal Containment Agency since she was 8 years old, and even though she's the only one in the IPCA with the ability to see through glamours—and as far as anyone knows, in the world—she'd rather think of herself as a normal 16-year-old girl.

That doesn't mean that she doesn't dream about all of the same things that every other teenager wants: To belong. To avoid her creepy sort-of-ex. To find lurrrve. To go to prom.

But a sudden rash of murders in the paranormal population has knocked Evie out of her semi-complacent-existence: Because it's looking more and more like the murders have something to do with her.

A few elements reminded me of Buffy: The most obvious, of course, is that IPCA is like the Initiative, in that it's a shadowy organization supposedly devoted to protecting humans from paranormals but that they [SPOILER, BUT NOT REALLY IF YOU'VE WATCHED BUFFY] secretly have a penchant for vivisection and whatnot [END SPOILER]. The second was that Evie named her taser "Tasey", just like Kendra called her stake "Mr. Pointy". But while they do so for the same reasons—loneliness and the security blanket thing—Evie's ongoing internal more-than-wistful-less-than-melancholy never conveyed the same emotional resonance. And there's a Faith-related similarity at the very end that I suspect will end up playing out in much the same way as it did in Buffy.

While Evie's voice isn't particularly exciting—she so desperately longs for normalcy that it comes through in a really average voice, maybe?—she's relatable. Paranormalcy has a fun premise and it'll go over well with younger paranormal fans, as well as parents who're uncomfortable with profanity and sexual content, as Evie says "bleep" instead of swearing* and the kissing bits are way more chaste than Twilight, even.

It has some funny parts, though—Kiersten White clearly knows her teen dramas and there were some great teen/adult moments—and once Evie starts experiencing the world outside of IPCA, the book gets much more interesting. So much so that I'm planning on reading the sequel to see where the story goes.

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*Something that I found more distracting than anything else, though she has a believable reason for doing so.

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Book source: ILLed through my local library.