Smith,
L. J. The Vampire Diaries: Awakening. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
276
pages.
Reviewed
by J. d’Artagnan Love
After
reading Vampire Diaries: Awakening, I have a really hard time believing that
Stephenie Meyer never read vampire fiction. Twilight parallels this book so
very closely, it almost seem like she ripped off the story from L. J. Smith.
That being said, in Vampire Diaries: Awakening, Stefan Salvatore is a new guy
in town and, naturally, he’s a vampire. Elena, the female protagonist of the
story is haunted by the recent death of her parents and infatuated with Stefan
but Stefan is too troubled about being a monster to truly let Elena into his
heart. By the cliff-hanger ending, a love triangle has formed. Sound familiar?
I found
this book entertaining but a bit dated. It’s dated in the ways it illustrated
teenage social structures. In the story there is one “queen” of the high school
(Elena) and her “crowd” of cool people. Their values and interests are shallow
and materialistic. The social structures are reminiscent of the films Clueless
and Can’t Hardly Wait; they’re very 90s era and irrelevant to teenagers of
today’s world. My biggest issue was how manipulative Elena was in trying to “have”
Stefan. I’m pretty sure Mean Girls blew this kind of behavior out of the water
(again, going back to how 90s clichéd this book is). If she could drop the
manipulation and give some concrete reasons for why she loves Stefan other than
him being “so hot,” I might actually like her.
If we
stripped away the 90s social structures, the story itself is pretty
interesting. One of my favorite parts of reading vampire fiction is picking
about the vampire mythology used in each series or book. These vampires don’t
sparkle and in order to change from human to vampire, the Dracula method is
used (vampire sucks human blood and then human drinks vampire blood). There are
some other fun magical features to these vampires but I’ll leave that up to you
to discover should you choose to read this book.
2 darts
out of 5
This
book is FOR people who: want a quick, meaningless read with some fun vampire
characters.
This
book is NOT FOR people who: want character depth or maturity.
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