Summer Reading: Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

Unless you're as blind as a bat, not very observant, or have never visited amazon.com. you know that one of their biggest and oldest features is the recommendations. Based on a few of my purchases/ratings, amazon has been telling me to read the Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris. Bored, not wanting to spend money on a couple of books I really want to read, I decide to grab one from the library. Thankfully, they had the large-print version of the first in the series, Dead Until Dark.

The protagonist/narrator is Sookie Stackhouse. Sookie's your typical young southern lady, lives with her grandmother, likes a quiet life, has a good-hearted-yet-wild brother who needs to settle down, works as a cocktail waitress...oh yeah, and she's a telepath. Like I said, typical. She lives in a small Louisiana town filled with antebellum homes and all the people she's known her entire life.

Things change when a vampire comes into her bar. For one thing, she can't read his mind--not having to exert the effort to not read his mind is quite the treat for her.

Vampire? Yeah, a vampires. In this world, Vampires had recently become a legally-protected minority, still struggling for social acceptance (think the Newcomers in Alien Nation).

This particular vampire's name is Bill Compton (name's not exactly up there with Lestat or Armand...or even Angel, Drusilla, Spike), a veteran of The War Between the States with a kind heart (or something like that). Sookie and Bill hit it off, become friends, he spends time with her TWBtS buff grandmother, delighting her with eye-witness accounts. We also get to meet some other vampires...not the fine-upstanding citizens like Bill (who's "mainstreamed"), but creepy, murderous, fiends.

Enter the plot-complication. A series of vampire-related murders. Is it Bill? Is it a Vampire that Bill knows/brought into the community? Is it someone else in Sookie's life? While they stumble their way to discovering the murderer, Sookie and Bill fall in love, deal with social stigmas (from both of their cultures), and have a narrow escape or two.

This was an okay, light read. Sookie's charming, sweet, not too neurotic (was afraid I was in for a second-rate Bridget Jones with a twist). I wouldn't mind reading what happens to the couple next, but I'm not rushing out to grab it (contra Solomon vs. Lord/Thin Blue Alibi). Give it a try if you're desperate for something new.

Grade: C+ not really a triumph for amazon's personality test.