Very, very different than the other YA vampire fiction out there these days.

Male protagonist, certainly interested in romance/sex but not consumed by it the way Bella (Twilight) is. A more realistic/scientific look at the phenomenon, if you will, despite the fictionalness of it all. Lots of cool Manhattan stuff: underground, bureaucratical, conspiratorial.

Certainly pulls you right along. Enjoyable easy reading. I mean, other than the bug stuff. If you are bug, insect and gross-phobic the way I am…well, let’s just say it was hard for me to even let my fingers touch the pages of the Parasite chapters as a) soooooo nasty and b) some of my worst nightmares CONFIRMED!!!

But on a separate note, as I said with the other: It kinda cracks me up how every “new” installment to vampire lore needs to put their own tweak on the legends. This rewrites a different part of the legend, but I still fail to understand the reason to need to make those tweaks to what are centuries old “beliefs” (if you can call them that). Your writing should stand out as something special, even without that tweaking; if you feel you have to tweak aspects of the overall Vampire legends in order to stand out, maybe you’re concentrating on the wrong thing. I’m not saying that’s Westerfeld’s problem (I think this book is certainly well written, which I can’t say about the other series, which is much more superficial and really only works on an emotional level), but why the need to change the mirror bit of the mythos? Yeah, in YA speak, I don’t “get” that urge.

Family tension, even in other people’s families, can really set me on edge. This book had me anxious from page 1, just waiting for Bad Stuff to Happen as the tension and anxiety of each character grows and grows. Definitely had me on the edge of the seat.

Really neat characterization and very finely detailed: the mom’s art (so cool), the dad’s writing. The intricacies of the familial relationships were so well plotted: you love someone, but you see their weakness; you hate when they act a certain way, but you know how to handle them when that’s the case; etc.

When the moment of crisis comes, it was not at all what I expected, and that includes the follow-up events.

But I have to wonder what the blurb writer was thinking. Because the last sentence on the front flap blurb? Yeah, that’s NOT what I got out of this at all.