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Ceridwen

Ceridwen

You kids get off my lawn. 

Kitty and the Midnight Hour - Carrie Vaughn Okay. So I'm supposed to do a drunk book review of Dead Until Dark*, but now that I'm actually drunk, I find that I don't want to deal with Sookie Sackhouse and whatever she's about. I also find that I keep having to go back and clean up my crappy typing, but I guess that's the problem with the drunk book review. (I simply don't want to know how long it took me to clean up that last sentence.)

Anyway, I pretty thoroughly dug this book. I've been on this mission to understand what's up in paranormal chick lit for a while, starting with Twilight, moving into the Sookie books, and then finally with this Kitty book. Unlike the former two, I actually want to read more in this series, and I think it's because of one thing: sex. Twilight's all crazy-sexless, you know, except for the parts where we sigh and breathe about how lovely and alabaster and marble-hard Edward is, and the Sookie book is all full of sex that makes me feel like I'm in a 7th grade sex ed class with a full-on diagram of the female reproductive tract, and that doesn't feel that sexy either.

Oops, here comes the drunken digression. I think I might hate vampires. This may be my sister's fault, because she has described them as “high functioning zombies”, and this has gotten inside my brain, and every single time one of these paranormal chick-lit protagonists beds a vampire I think, “Ye gads, girl, you have just fucked a corpse,” which is terribly gross and wrong, but I can't tell if the gross and wrong is inside my brain, or inside the damn corpse who is also the masculine ideal. I mean, yikes. I like guys. I think they are neat in their guyness. I'm trying hard in my drunkenness to not make fun of them, but I guess I'm trying to say I like when guys are guys and not alabaster fucking corpses who are like 300 years older than the spunky chicks that they impressed with. (That sentence ended with a preposition. Moving along...)

Anyway. Kitty. What I liked about this story was that it was about a person who begins, in medias res, already having this werewolf thing, and that the werewolf thing was pretty well thought out. Werewolves are different from vampires in that they are not gross corpses, but divided people. They're like most of us, with our ids and superegos, only once a month their ids go all crazy and run all over the countryside baying at the moon and killing shit and rolling in super gross stuff like the collie I had once that rolled in a dead fish because her weird collie-brain told her that that was a good idea. You know? Kitty's part of a pack, and unlike people, the pack is based on all this weird dominance shit. (Ha ha, right? Anyone? Get it?)

So Kitty starts a call-in show about the paranormal, and then all hell breaks loose, and then she has to come to terms with the fucked up couple who are the alphas of her pack. As usual, I'm struggling to not be insanely confessional on a book-themed social networking site, but I've know couples in my day like the alphas in Kitty's pack, couples where the woman used sex and the man used cluelessness to get what they wanted, and Kitty's reaction of love and disgust seemed just about right.

Although, just to be a big reviewer bitch, I didn't like that the main character was named Kitty, even if the author joked several times about how it was a bad name for a werewolf. I dislike cutesy names, which may be one of the main reasons why I don't like chick-lit, even if it might be otherwise okay. I don't know, maybe it isn't okay. I find it hard to judge in my current state. Oh, and back to sex, there was very little in this book, and that made me happy, because I think dog-sex may be as bad as corpse-sex, and I'm not really interested in either. Yuck. I'm going to go drink some water and lie on the floor.

*I had to fix the bad italics, even though Richard's ragging on me to leave it as an example of how you really can slur while typing. what.ever.