Book Review: Bite Me by Donaya Haymond

Hey all, Sam here.

We are home from our little weekend Ren Faire getaway…and we are still pretty tired. I had a dumb moment while we were gathering everything together that we needed to pitch our tent at the available campsites, I forgot to pack our blankets…so we had the sheets for the air mattress, but no blankets. And it got pretty chilly overnight, so much so that we were shivering all night and didn’t really get much sleep.

But overall we had a pretty nice time, and we’ll get back to our usual schedule of posts starting tomorrow. And…I’m still planning on doing basically an all weekend reading marathon for Memorial Day Weekend, because I’m used to mostly unplugging and doing a lot of reading while mostly disconnected from all the distractions of the internet. I’ll probably post a bunch of progress photo updates on my Instagram (@SamRushingBooks), so be sure to follow me there May 26-May 29 as I try to read a whole bunch of books.

Anyway, let’s go ahead and jump into today’s post, a review of the second book in the Legends of Laconia USA series by Donaya Haymond. Oh…and I guess I should say that there are some minor spoilers in the book summary for the first book.

It’s hard enough for Dianne to be fifteen and obviously to love her parents, even worse when there’s something weird about them no one quite understands. Her father being a vampire and her mother being a werewolf is a simple fact of life. More worrisome are Mom and Dad getting sick for unknown reasons, the effect an accidental display of power is having on her social life, and the possibility that the boy next door thinks she’s a freak. Matthew seems to like her, yet there’s something off about him. Dr. Nat Silver, a vampire with several medical degrees, may provide some answers. For the most part Dianne feels it’s her wit and devotion versus a world more cruel than any supernatural being could ever be.

My Thoughts

Rating: 4.5 stars (nostalgia rating 5 stars)

At its heart, Halloween Romance, was a romance, as the title suggests. A staple of romance books is that the couple ends up in a happily ever after (or at least a happily for now). So obviously Ferdinand and Selene ended up together….and this book takes place years later, following their daughter. That is all clear in the book’s summary.

What I won’t talk about in this review is that there is an encounter/scenario/series of scenes in this chapter that talk about a pretty big event from the first book…and so I absolutely suggest that anyone read Halloween Romance before picking up Bite Me. Although, again, I’ll point out that Eternal Press shut down and so these books are sadly out-of-print, which means finding a copy is a little bit difficult.

But I still want to talk about these books, because they were so important to me in my earlier years as a reader. Not my earliest years, because I have been a serious fan of books since I was a toddler, but still in that high school/college age where I was really figuring out the types of books I enjoyed.

Plus, this book introduces us readers to Dr. Nat Silver, and I adore Nat. I have such fond memories of the character development and arc for this character, although obviously I won’t talk about that here. But this is where we are introduced to another vampiric character, and this one also has some fun quirks to him, that are fun and endearing and adorable. Plus he helps Ferdinand and Selene and Dianne through some stuff, and is able to answer some questions for them.

Oh, this book also introduces us to Dianne’s neighbor/friend Taylor, who will be the protagonist for the third book in the series, a book that basically takes place at the same time as this one, so there is some nice inter-connectivity within the series.

Ferdinand and Selene are still great characters, and this second installment does a great job of introducing Dianne and Matthew and Nat and Taylor, all of whom will be big characters through the rest of the books.

Again, this book is around 130 pages, so it is a pretty quick read and I did fly through it. But it is also enjoyable. Dianne is still in high school and is trying to figure herself out, and so we have that teenage drama to make the story feel more intense and dramatic. This makes it stand out on its own, while also having some of the elements of paranormal creature interactions and such that were introduced with the first book.

Even all these years later, I still very much love reading these books. I’m glad I have the ability to reread the whole series. Honestly, I might keep doing some nostalgia reads, while also reading (and re-reading) books by friends, as well as self-pubbed and indie press authors. I say nostalgia reads because I really want to re-read the Animorphs series, and I’m also feeling like I want to re-read the Stravaganza series.

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Well, that is all from me for today. Thank you so much for stopping by, and I’ll be back soon with more geeky content.