MIRA, $6.99, ISBN 1-55166-668-5
Fantasy Romance, 2003
The zombified woman on the cover – whose eyes are running away in two different directions – must be Amber Lily, a truly horrible teenage half-vampire, half-human, all moron creature after I’m done staking a ten-feet stake through her annoying heart. This book jumps over the ugly shark and right into Pits of Mordor with her introduction, as if the annoying Evil Sister caricature weren’t bad enough.
Embrace the Twilight is a book that doesn’t know what it wants to be. It starts out as a petty “I’m Better Than My Bitch Sister!” cat fight between “good” Sarafina and “evil” Katerina, stereotypical Gypsies who burn one another’s caravans, try to steal each other’s boyfriends, and more. No wonder a vampire comes and eats them all. Yay! Alas, Sarafina turns into a vampire and lives forever. Bummer.
Even before she becomes Dumbarina the Mistress of the Suck, she has some mental telepathy thing going with Willem Stone, a war refugee who took the wrong road in some terrorist-infested country and ended up being held captive. He believes that she’s just a figment of his imagination. Wrong, Stone Boy, she’s the Mistress of Suck, and she’s coming to suck him. I don’t mean it to come out like that, but you know what I mean. I hope.
The sisterly cat fight nonsense aside, I’m quite interested in the bond between the Mistress of Suck and the Stone Boy, but next thing I know, the author abandons her main characters in favoring of getting what seems like very wimpy moaning bloodsucking losers from her previous books to band together to save Amber Lily the Mutant Gargoyle Punky Brewster from herself. Humans are again the evil ones, and everybody misunderstands everybody else, and the giant shark jumps over and takes a big chunk out of this book. This book’s silly external conflict is just like every last book of this author. Maybe it’s time for the author to try new tricks with her writing.
The haphazard way the story unfurls itself and very irritating characters cause this book to fully embrace the suck. Embrace the Twilight could have done a lot better if it doesn’t feel like a hatchet job produced just to meet some deadlines. The hideous woman on the cover is probably me, struck dazed with bewilderment and annoyance, after reading this tedious attempt at vampire romance.
