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Ceridwen

Ceridwen

You kids get off my lawn. 

Marked - Kristin Cast, P.C. Cast I put this on hold at the library at some point in the last three months. I'm pretty sure that I thought it was something else, something that someone here on GR had actually recommended to me, but when I now poke around, the review that stands out is Elizabeth's, where she skillfully, and accurately, rips this book a new one. Why can't I ever actually write down the recommendations people make me, instead of relying on my increasingly crap memory, a memory that drops hunks of shite like this one on my unsuspecting future self? Do I really hate me? Alas, the only kind of time travel I engage in is the regular, then-to-now in-real-time kind, so I can't go back and ask myself what I'm playing at.

It's been a while since I was a teenager, so what do I know from teen dialogue? But great zombie gravy, this seemed insulting and phony. I'm also not a member of any organized-type monotheism, but jumping jellybeans, if I were, boy would I be pissed. While espousing some of the most rigid moralizing this side of vampire stories with vampires that sparkle, the book manages to serve up a view of People of the Faith as patriarchal squares, offering instead the cozy confines of what could only be described as a cult. Jeez.

I think the whole vampire thing comes ready-packed with a sense of sexual transgression: the exchange of one set of bodily fluids for another. As such, it often works as a lovely metaphor for closeted and emergent gay communities. (I think this is where Alan Ball went with vampirism in True Blood, but I've never actually seen that.) Is this why authors such as the Casts (& the writer of the Sookie Stackhouse books) feel obliged to include gay characters for the first person protags to be friends with in that crappy, “Oh, I'm so sorry to hear about your horrible disfigurement” kind of way? I mean, we drink blood, but we're not fags, right? Yuck. Don't like. Didn't finish.