Jessica Rules the Dark Side by Beth Fantaskey
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
A book that I surprisingly really enjoyed (and shamefully so) was Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side, which took the whole vampire in love/vampire princess thing and spun it on its head a little bit.
Jessica Rules the Dark Side is the sequel, and, truly, all it does is make the case that the book really should have ended after the first one.
Jessica is now married to her vampire prince and they live in the castle in Europe. There is then a murder(!) and Lucius may be implicated. Jessica now needs to assert a leadership role as princess to find the killer and hopefully clear her husband's name.
The issue with this book was the amount of time I sat there saying "really?" The first book was fun and cute because it at least gave the appearance of being self-aware, that it was a book that understood the tropes it was working with and reacted accordingly. Rules, however, moves itself very quickly into formulaic supernatural mystery territory and really doesn't get out. It, thankfully, spends some time with the mythology of the vampire families, but it's not enough to drag it out of the doldrums somewhat.
I'm not sure I'll pick up any other books in the series at this point. I'm not convinced that the story has anywhere to go, and that's unfortunate.
View all my reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment