Overbite: Meena Harper, #2 -- Meg Cabot
Six months after the events of Insatiable, Meena Harper is single, living with her brother, and working for a secret branch of the Vatican: The Palatine Guard.
They're demon hunters.
Considering the fact that her ex-boyfriend is the Prince of Darkness, Meena has decidedly mixed feelings about their kill 'em all! attitude. But, you know. A job's a job.
And she figures that maybe she can change things from the inside.
Considering my meh-with-an-extra-dollop-of-meh feelings about Insatiable, the first book in this series, even I'm a little bit surprised that I picked up Overbite.
But, you know.
There it was, on my TBR pile.
Staring at me.
Meg Cabot's name just called out*.
What with the whole reading slump situation, it kind of made sense for me to pick up a book that I didn't have particularly high hopes about.
Good thing, too. About the lack of high hopes, I mean.
Because while I certainly read the whole thing—and read it in almost one sitting—I came away with even meh-ier feelings than before. Since it didn't have the soap opera world or the vampire mania to riff on, Overbite didn't have the humor of Insatiable. The storyline wasn't particularly compelling: I mean, there's fluff, and then there's fluff so insubstantial that it wouldn't fill a half-page outline. And sadly, the more entertaining characters got very little screen-time, so I was mostly stuck with the main characters:
1. Meena, who is, despite her precog abilities, pretty boring (she definitely falls into the WHY IS EVERYONE IN LOVE WITH HER? category);
2. And Lucien Antonescu, who, I kid you not, makes Edward Cullen look like an optimistic sunny ray of healthy-amounts-of-self-esteem sunny sunshine.
I mean, really. If I cared enough to be on Team Lucien or Team Alaric, I'd be on Team Alaric purely because he's slightly less tortured.
That isn't to say there isn't some classic Meg Cabot Fun (SPOILERS, but seriously, this isn't really the sort of book where that matters much):
Meena wasn't sure which she found more disturbing: that she'd been hunting her ex-boyfriend's murderous wife with a hair dryer beneath the streets of Manhattan, or that when she opened her eyes after having been knocked unconscious by this person, she realized she'd been rescued by another one of her ex-boyfriends.
And there was the classic Buffy/Angel kiss moment:
Lucien pulled away with a blistering curse, then looked down at the triangle of skin framed by the open collar of his white shirt. Emblazoned on his flesh, like a brand, was the image of the cross Alaric had given her, and which still hung at her throat.
There wasn't anything in the text that suggested it was supposed to parallel the Buffy/Angel kiss, though, so maybe it was just a coincidence.
Eh.
Mostly, I just wanted Alaric Wulf to grab Jack Bauer (the vampire-hating Pomeranian), ditch everyone else, and go have some adventures together.
One-word review: MEH².
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*Shouted, really: Is it just me, or is the font they're using for her name getting bigger and bigger?
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Previously:
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Book source: Review copy from the publisher.