Live Life's Lemons.

Dead to the World by Charlaine Harris

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars

I've been reading the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris for several months now, in between readings for my classes. It's the series that HBO's True Blood is based off of, which should make it slightly more appealing for fans of the show. I wouldn't know since HBO has yet to release the first season on DVD. Seriously, HBO. Get on that.

(According to Amazon, it's set to be released May 19, 2009. I'll believe it when I see it.)

This is a review of the 4th book of the series.

I won't reveal any spoilers here, but my general opinion of the series so far is that it's a good lightweight book for those bedtime reads. To take to the beach. On a flight from Tampa to San Francisco. To sit on the back of the toilet tank. Okay, I'll stop here. You get the picture.

The main character is Sookie, a 20-something waitress in (as far as my Google research can tell) a fictional town called Bon Temps in Louisiana. She can read minds. Dates vampires. And has sexy supernatural men taking numbers to climb into her bed.

Harris produces the vampire novel for an adult crowd, an NC-17 Twilight, whose racy and provocative language and situations would have Edward packing up his bags and hopping the first plane to this small backwards town.

Honestly, I could really do without all of the dirty descriptions. But hey, I knew there was a reason HBO jumped on this series.

There’s not much in way of interesting characters, once you get passed the whole vampire/werewolf/shape-shifter/telepathics. Sure, they're pretty interesting in their own, but fairly predictable and boring.

The appeal of these books (for me anyway) is in the plot. Harris is a good story teller; the plots are always solid and entertaining. She always leaves a little "oh!" moment at the end to solidify everything that has happened and its fun.

If you read the Twilight series and enjoyed it, I would definitely recommend this series. If you read the Twilight series and threw Breaking Dawn against the wall a quarter of the way through, I would still recommend this series.

Because the minute Harris introduces a crazy half-bred baby with a dumbass name; I'll be the first to sound the alarm.

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