Bite Me! by Melissa Francis

Rating: 4/5

I was lucky enough to win a copy of this book when I left a comment in one of Diana Peterfreund’s Blog giveaways. It had been a while since I read a vampire YA story and I was looking forward to getting this in the mail. At the time I was just finishing The Demon’s Lexicon, by Sarah Rees Brennan and had a list of books I needed to read for an upcoming class, but I managed to squeeze this one in. I am glad I did.

AJ Ashe is a seventeen-year-old vampire with a dilemma: the boy she loves has now become her stepbrother! To make matters worse, her poorly controlled vampire instincts might have led her to turn a classmate into a vampire and it now appears he is stalking her. All AJ wants is to have a normal human life, but when she discovers her ties to an evil vampire family, she relentlessly researches her family’s dark past for answers, which puts her and everyone around her in more danger than she’d thought possible.

Riddled with the usual teenage angst of a seventeen-year-old girl, I thought as I began to read this that it was going to be your typical teen romance novel with a vampire twist. However, once those first few chapters were out of the way, AJ becomes a character the reader can relate to and wants to see succeed. Interestingly, the story does not solely focus on the fact that she’s a vampire, nor does it make a big deal of it; AJ is simply a young girl trying to find herself and answer some very hard questions.

Melissa Francis pulled this off beautifully. With all vampire books out there in this vampire craze, Bite Me! is one of the few stories that actually has something to say. Its topics include: family bonds, honesty, responsibility and friendship, among others.

The most realistic aspect of this book, and admittedly my favorite, is that AJ found out many things about her new family and her ancestors, but has not yet found all the answers she was searching for. In fact, she now has more questions than before! I can’t wait to read the second book and find out what choices she will make.
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