Daily Archives: 12 August 2005

Vamped

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Vamped : A Novel

David Sosnowski

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I always enjoy a good vampire story, so when I saw Vamped staring at me from the library shelf, I had to take it home.

In this alternate future, the only humans left are farm-raised for uber-rich vampires (all the others have been vamped already), and a single box of Count Chocula goes for several hundred dollars on ebay. Then Marty, an eighty year old vampire, and the person who was responsible for the vamping of the world, finds a five year old mortal child on the run from one of the farms, and instead of killing her, or vamping her into a Screamer (as other child-vamps are called), he decides to raise her as his daughter.

Plot twists and romance are woven through the story, but the parts that I enjoyed most were the descriptions of societal changes – grocery stores selling mainly bleach and laundry detergent, and apartments built without toilets, for example.

Leap of Faith

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Leap of Faith : Memoirs of an Unexpected Life

Queen Noor

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I borrowed this from a friend about a month ago because she seemed to really enjoy it, and I wasn’t disappointed in the least, though I did take forever to really begin reading it, which is rare for me.

In most respects, this is a fairly straightforward tale of the way an American girl named Lisa ends up being Queen Noor of Jordan, and that part of the book was interesting enough. But the first-hand explanations of the political, cultural, and social climate in that part of the world, from the early seventies to today, was really what gripped me.

The events are all well-known to most of us.
The perspective is new, and interesting.