The Cronicles of Vladimir Tod by Heather Brewer is a rumination on what it would be like for a vampire to try to blend in with mainstream students.
Vlad Tod is not your average teenager. He's unpopular and bullied, but he's friends with the most popular and well-liked guy in the school. He likes one of the prettiest girls at school, but he can't figure out if she likes him back. He's a vampire, but he tries to act human. Life is full of ups and downs as he completes middle school and goes on to Bathory High School, ups but mainly downs that include trying to find out why his parents really died, who killed his English teacher, a boy who is determined to prove to the world that Vlad really is a vampire, fighting one of his best friends to the death, his growing need for fresh blood, an insane vampire who keeps trying to kill him or steal his blood (it varies from book to book), and trying to figure out the legend of the Pravus. It seems that the more questions Vlad asks the more answers he needs, and the greater the lengths people will go to to keep him from finding out the truth. When his home and life gets ripped apart, and Bathory seems close to drowning in the blood of its townspeople, he has to cast aside what he thought he knew about the person he trusted the most in this world and make a choice that will tear him apart. Being a vampire really does bite.
Vlad Tod is medicine for the Twilight-sickened soul. The books offer a great insight into a teenage boy's mind, and the view of a vampire that you'd never thought of before. Yeah, sure, we all know that they're bloodthirsty creatures of the night, but what happens when they're forced out of their nocturnal habits? Sleeping in class, of course. And how do they get their blood fix? Blood packets in Hostess cakes.
The ultimate villain, the one that betrays Vlad at the end, confuses me. I can't criticize it more without giving anything away, but it just doesn't make sense. His reasons for doing as he did are lame, and I feel justified in calling the person who should've seen through them but didn't an airhead. Of course, this is in retrospect, but . . . Also, I have complaints in the romance department. I don't like Meridith. Even from the beginning, I didn't like her. I mean, she's a blond and he's a vampire. She wears pink and he wears black. Tell me how that was supposed to work out? Let Joss have 'er. I like the other girl much better . . . She's awesome. I imagine her wearing, like, six-inch black leather platform boots, for some reason, and I wonder if her name is derived from that Hot Chili Peppers song.
The writing style is very good. Eight Grade Bites was Heather Brewer's first book, and it was surprisingly well done. The boys are regular comedians, and even though there are some parts that are of no consequence, that add nothing to the plot line, they don't subtract from the overall storyline. But be on the look out for small details . . . they might mean something later on in the book, or even later on in the series. It's all fast paced, though, and a quick read (I finished the first book, 110 pages of it, in a half an hour), but you're hooked to the very end. Even at the end of Twelfth Grade Kills you're left wondering what's next?. Hopefully her next series, The Slayer Chronicles, will help sort that out.
The books come in the order of Eight Grade Bites, Ninth Grade Slays, Tenth Grade Bleeds, Eleventh Grade Burns, and Twelfth Grade Kills.
This is the URL for the website if you're interested in looking into it a bit more: http://www.vladtod.com/#/news
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