REVIEW: Real Vampires Don't Sparkle by Amy Fecteau

Real Vampires Don't Sparkle by Amy Fecteau
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The book bored me silly. I thought with a satire title the book would be funny. It wasn’t. Oh, there was one joke at Twilight’s expense but it was more of a nod to the title than a true attempt at humor. Other than that, the book had nothing that could be deemed funny whatsoever. The book was 90% filler, 10% plot, and I’m being lenient.

+ the characters

Matheus was whiny and reckless. He never persisted in seeking answers as he should have. Many questions should have been answered on the spot for the sake of the plot. Those answers would have educated him and more importantly, the reader. They would have explained what the fuck that was going on. It was absurd how Quin repeatedly and voluntarily put himself in danger with Matheus rashly chasing after him as if both had a death wish. I hated how despite his attraction to Quin, Matheus kept insisting that he was not gay and that being gay is all right but he’s not gay. The dude protested too much. Nobody was fooled.

Quin humored Matheus too much. He acted too mellow and patient with Matheus’s crap to be convincing as an antediluvian master vampire. I wished he took more care to discipline Matheus because the dude needed it, if not for Matheus than for me and my patience. However, what I truly took issue was his reticence. Quin was not a silent person but rarely did he ever say things that mattered, things that revealed his motives for all the seemingly random actions that he did. I never learned why he turned Matheus and claimed him as his soul mate.

+ the plot

There were a lot of things that I never learned that the book should have told me. Dialogues were rarely meaningful. In the rare occasions that they were and gave long-desired answers, they didn’t have the impact on the characters that they should have. “Oh, my ex-girlfriend/childhood friend was a werewolf all along? Okey dokey. Let’s return to chatting about meaningless shit.” Virtually everything, from the dialogue to the action, was delivered in a deadpan way.

The plot lacked that pull that keeps a reader reading. The reasons I finished the book at all were because of my unreasonable distaste to leave a book unfinished and my obligation to review the book. Not until the last third of the book did the plot finally seemed like it was going in a direction instead of wandering around like a bored kid. On the rising action part of the plot, readers learn a war was being waged between vampires and vampires-hating humans, something so incredibly important it should have been declared immediately in the beginning.

What was worse was that it was not until the last minute did the relationship between Matheus and Quin made an inch of progress. I knew this book was not a mm-romance, but FFS. I couldn’t believe it took so long for Matheus to even consider accepting his feelings for Quin. I couldn’t believe Quin never made a move and communicated his feelings towards Matheus. It was cliché how it took something seriously dangerous, with both men on the edge of life and true death, for them to open up to one another.

Equally bad was the fact that the ending was left open. The villains weren’t defeated. Nothing was resolved. Nothing.

In Conclusion

I rate Real Vampires Don’t Sparkle 2-stars for it was okay but only because I was bored and not actively annoyed. Though the writing was competent, the storytelling was crap. The book was a pointless time-suck. Do not recommend.

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