Yzabel / September 25, 2012

Revamp by Beck Sherman

My rating: [rating=4]

Summary:

FOR THREE DAYS, IT WAS DARK.

News reporters scrambled. This was the biggest story to come along in weeks.

They called it a blackout.

The last one was in New York City in 2003, but this one was different, special, because the grids in six major cities across the country had been fried, kaput, see-you-next-Sunday. Everyone with some jurisdiction blamed each other, and when there was no one left to blame, terrorism rode in on its gallant steed.

It was the media’s fault. They were so busy stuffing fanatical Muslims with a penchant for Allah and decapitations down the American citizen’s throat, that they never saw it coming. I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on them.

They were partially right.

It was terror after all, but a whole new kind. And when the lights came back on, things had changed.

The dark had brought us visitors.

Review:

(Book provided through Read It & Reap in the Shut Up & Read group, in exchange for an honest review.)

I found this book fairly enjoyable; I dont have a lot of time to read non-academic books these weeks, but if I had, I’d probably have read it in two or three sittings only (it’s a long novel).

The pace was fast enough, the events unfolding in a way that made me want what would happen next. Emma’s reactions regarding the existence of vampires seemed logical enough to me: she didn’t accept it too easily, trying to find more realistic explanations, but she also wasn’t too retentive about it, confronting the ‘revelation’ to her own experiences in order to check if this could be true or not.

There were highly tense scenes, made easy to picture oneself thanks to vivid descriptions. That’s usually the kind of thing I expect from my vampire novels—to show the gruesome nature of the beasts underneath, even though they still seem human on the surface. And yet, the book also tackles an interesting aspect of the duality of such creatures, for throughout the story and at the end, they were, all in all, still close enough to humanity to reproduce exactly the same old schemas (shortages, class divisions, the ‘rich’ hoarding all the good blood while the ‘poor’ had to stick to the vampiric equivalent of junk food…). I liked that the author decided to explore such aspects, because from the start, I thought that such a takeover by vampires couldn’t go smoothly, and that the mighty bloodsuckers were sooner or later run into the conundrum of “now that we’ve gotten rid of the humans… what do we eat?” In fact, I’d have been disappointed if it hadn’t happened.

I liked the flashbacks used to explain what had happened to some of the characters. I usually have no problems following those, and they were probably a better method to involve us readers than simply have said characters tell them in a dialogue or long-winded first-person explanation. And I liked that Emma’s ‘romance’ with Cooper was only a budding one, a few potential hooks here and there: it leaves room for more, while still being believable.

I have a couple of gripes with the story, though. First, I’d have liked to read more about the blackouts themselves: they seemed mysterious enough in the cover blurb, but reading about them after the events was a bit anticlimatic (considering the blurb, that is). Also, I’ve wondered a lot about Emma’s reaction regarding her family: she’d sometimes think about the boyfriend she had left on campus… but what about her mother who probably lived a few miles only from where her daughter now had to live? Why didn’t Emma try to discover what had happened to her mother—or, at least, why not show her thinking about it a little more often (even if only to conclude “she’s a vampire or dead, and I shouldn’t think about it anymore”). And I’m really not sure either about the last vampire the hunters off at the end: sure, it tied with something mentioned at the beginning of the novel, but… I don’t know, it just came as kind of “what the hell?…” to me.

But no matter those, I liked the story. I don’t know if there’s a second installment in the making. I think this one works well as a standalone, as the main issues are solved at the end; at the same time, there are still enough elements left to development for a second book to be welcome too. If there’s going to be one, I’ll definitely be interested in reading it.