Eternal -- Cynthia Leitich Smith
Eternal is the companion to Tantalize. It doesn't feature the same characters*, but it's set in the same world, and characters from both books cross over in Blessed.
I love crossovers: Books that are fully self-contained, but interconnected. They can be read as stand-alones, but when read together, they give you nice jolts as you revisit familiar characters and locales. Like Charles de Lint's Newford books and stories. Or Sarah Dessen's novels.
Anyway, Eternal. Zachary is a guardian angel. He's been known to enjoy his heavenly powers of invisibility for less-than-angelic purposes (mostly involving seeing his teen charge, Miranda, naked), but he does genuinely care about her. So much so that when her life is threatened, he breaks the Big Rule, takes direct action, and tries to save her.
He fails.
He fails, and to add insult to injury, his powers are taken from him and he is stuck on earth.
He fails, and add even more insult to injury, Miranda gets turned into a vampire. Not just any vampire, but a vampire princess.
Now, over a year later, Miranda and Zachary are both about to get a second chance.
I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Eternal, given how burnt out I am on vampires. At this point, most vampire books have been relegated to the Way, Way Later pile. But I remembered how much I'd liked Tantalize, and I'm curious about Blessed, so I picked it up.
Don't get me wrong: I had issues. For a guy who's been around since 1945, Zachary still (generally, when it wasn't inconvenient) has the mentality of a 17-25-year-old**, and he seemed awfully human for an angel. When characters aren't human, I tend to enjoy them more when they don't act, you know, human. When they clearly have a different perspective. But it's the storyteller's prerogative to make choices like that, so I'm not saying it's necessarily a flaw. Just a place where my personal preference didn't jive with the book.
Part of me was skeeved out by Zachary, who, after watching and guarding Miranda 24/7 since her birth, had started eyeballing her nubile teen body. But then, the Less-Good (and far more inappropriate) part of me found the idea of a slightly lecherous guardian angel just... hilarious. And it made me like him more, even if it made me believe in him less. If that makes sense.
I understand, by the way, if you are completely horrified. It wasn't just the lechery, though! I also thought it was funny that angels apparently use Yahoo! Maps.
I really liked that the story goes in uncomfortable directions -- Miranda does some Really Bad Things as a vampire -- and I loved that it ends in a decidedly non-Twilight Saga manner. Which made me wonder if the bit about Zachary watching Miranda sleep night after night (a la Edward Cullen) was a deliberate Twilight parallel, in order to completely Blow The Reader's Mind by pulling an awesome switcheroo at the end.
Or maybe I'm, as I do tend to do, reading too much into it.
Fast-paced, entertaining, and a cool world: I'll be reading Blessed soon.
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*I think. It's been a looooong time since I read Tantalize.
**Then again, maybe angels just mature at a slower rate. I dunno.
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Book source: ILLed through my library. And holy crow, it is REALLY overdue.