Book Review: Throat

TITLE: Throat
AUTHOR: R. A. Nelson
PUBLISHED: 2011
CATEGORY: Young adult
GENRE: vampires, adventure, drama
SHORT PREMISE: A girl gets turned into a vampire
MY REVIEW: A girl gets bitten by a vampire and deals with the consequences of it. When her maker returns and threatens her family she runs away in the hopes of keeping them safe.
Throat is...odd to be honest. Some things I absolutely loved about it. For instance someone finally points out all the problems that come with being a vampire and how no, it's actually not very fun and there are severe consequences for it. It's not treated as glamourous or this fantastic thing to covet. I also liked that the vampires were actually scary, bloodthirsty, and violent.
What I didn't like was the main character. She was bland and boring and the entire book had that attitude of "all preps/popular people are horrible" that really bugs me in YA. Also there was ableism (much discriminatory comments about people with mental/health afflictions) that rubbed me the wrong way. Also I found it bizarre that there were vampires who were religious. Actually the whole religious thing in here was wierd and felt random in a book littered with violence. Also while it was nice seeing scary vampires, after awhile the violence sort of became ridiculous and felt like the author was trying too hard. Then the book just dragged and became uninteresting for about a hundred pages in.
Honestly this was a good start but it quickly fell apart near the middle. I do think this is a interesting take on the vampire genre and is definitely creative, I just felt it dragged on for too long and needed a lot of work. It felt like a rough draft of something much better. I'd recomend checking it out from the library and seeing for yourself though.
WHO SHOULD READ: vampire fans, fans of scary books
MY RATING: Three out of Five goth chicks