Grade: A-

Here’s an anthology that totally made me squee like I was a teenage girl creaming myself all over the new Ben Jelen CD or something (Ben Jelen, btw? SUPER-HOT). Meg Cabot, Michele Jaffe, Kim Harrison, and Stephanie Meyer IN ONE BOOK? OMG!!!!!!! And all of these stories were sooooooo good! I even liked the one by the girl whose name I’ve never heard of (her last name is Myracle? *scoff*). My favorite? Stephanie Meyer’s, of course! She’s got a delicious good boy hero (very, very, very good) and a very, very bad girl heroine (very, very, very bad). And it worked! The rest of the stories… well, I can’t pick the second best, either! But if I had to definitely pick the one I liked the least… I’d have to say… Meg Cabot’s. While the story itself was good, I’m so not a fan of dueling first-person narratives and I had to get past that to be able to enjoy it. On the other hand, Myracle’s is creepy, yet oddly poignant; Jaffe’s is hilarious and clever; and Kim Harrison’s is suspenseful, scary, and sexy. And the theme that pulls them all together? THE PROM, of course! If you’re a fan of 80’s American teen flicks, you know how important the prom is! Everything gets resolved at the prom! Damn, I can’t quite remember my own, but if it’s anything like these prom stories, maybe I shouldn’t remember. Heh.

Meg Cabot’s The Exterminator’s Daughter is about a teenage vampire slayer named Mary stalking the mysterious, ridiculously handsome new boy hanging around her best friend Lila with a crossbow in her hand. There is a reason for this. Sebastian Drake, according to Mary, is a vampire. And Mary should know. She comes from a long line of vampire slayers and was trained by her mother who was recently incapacitated and is currently not in the game. Because of this, it is now up to Mary to stop this vampire on her own. Too bad Lila is not at all worried about her new boyfriend being a vampire and wants to become a vampire herself. Enter Adam, the cute best friend of Ted, the boy Lila dumped for Sebastian. When Adam saves Mary from being torn in half by Sebastian, Mary is forced to tell him about her vampire-huntin’ activities. And why she’s got personal beef with Sebastian Drake. Yes, it’s personal. Naturally, Lila wants to take Sebastian to the prom and Mary figures she should go to the prom too… only to watch over Lila, of course. And if Adam wants to take her…

When I first started reading this, I didn’t notice that the chapters were subtitled with the name of the character whose point of view is being used to tell the story. The first POV was Mary’s and in the first chapter, she stalks Sebastian and Lila at a club with a crossbow and is getting ready to shoot Sebastian. In the second chapter, she suddenly has a water pistol filled with ketchup and a best friend named Ted… then I realized that I was now reading Adam’s 1st-person POV. My other problem with this story is that Adam rescues Mary twice. She’s the vampire slayer or whatever, but it is Adam who ends up rescuing her. Shit, if it were up to Mary to save us from the undead or something, we’re doomed. The writing is good, though I had a hard time distinguishing Mary’s narrative voice from Adam’s. Stupid dueling 1st-person POV. Made my brain hurt.

Lauren Myracle’s The Corsage was inspired by The Monkey’s Paw, which scared the crap out of me when I was a kid. You guys know the story: this dried-up monkey’s paw will grant the wisher three wishes, but the wishes comes with a very stiff price, often resulting in an ironic, gruesome end for the wisher. The morality of the tale is, “be careful what you wish for”. In Myracle’s version of the story, a girl named Frankie goes to a psychic with her best friends Will and Yun Sun, hoping the psychic will say something vague about Frankie’s love life and thus inspire Will to ask her to the prom. Frankie really, really wants to go with Will, but every time Will is about to ask her, Frankie tends to nervously babble about “grand gestures,” therefore making Will lose his nerve. The psychic doesn’t really tell them anything, except to warn Will about heights, and is altogether too vague. The monkey’s paw in this case is a dried up corsage. Frankie insists on taking it because she thinks it’ll be good for a laugh and her first wish is for the boy she loves to ask her to the prom. And he does. *shudder*

Okay, if you’ve read The Monkey’s Paw, you know exactly where this is going. Myracle does a good job of conveying a sense of dread throughout the piece and I was still freaked out at the end even though I knew what was going to happen. Remember your high school crush and all the stupid things you would have done to get him to ask you out? Yeah.

Madison Avery and the Dim Reaper by Kim Harrison had a lot of crap going on for such a short story, but nevertheless, I enjoyed it. Our heroine, Jane Smith Madison Avery was one of the most popular girls in her old high school and would have had the Best. Prom. Ever. if her mom didn’t suddenly decide to send her to live with her dad FOR NO REASON in a new town. Now Madison has no friends, no love life, and is forced to go to the prom with her dad’s boss’ geeky son, who reveals to her that his dad made him ask Madison to the prom. Pissed and humiliated, Madison decides she’s going to walk home in her heels and bumps into a hot guy wearing a sexy pirate costume (it’s a costume prom? WTF?!?). The hot guy whose name is Seth dances with her, kisses her, and asks to take her home. Madison, eager to spite her date and spend more time with Seth, agrees and goes off with him. Yeah… the sexy guy… umm… anyway, Madison ends up in a body bag. Didn’t her parents ever warn her about going off with sexy, mysterious strangers? Worst. Prom. Ever.

This story felt like the start of a series where a young girl is taken before her time and now has to contend with living her afterlife when she never finished living out her “real” life. It was very Dead Like Me except Madison doesn’t get splattered by a runaway toilet from the space station MIR. There’s stuff here about white reapers (guardian angel types), black reapers (the bad guys—-they take people before it’s their time), and grim reapers (the middle ground guys). There’s definitely too much for a short story, which was why I felt the ending seemed rushed. There was too much to wrap up and in the end, it still felt like, “this is only the beginning…” Does anyone know if Kim Harrison is starting a YA series with this heroine as the main character? I could definitely see it. There’s lots of stuff to be explored here. I don’t know if it’s anything Dead Like Me hasn’t already explored, but… man, I was such a huge fan of that show. I’d be open to reading a series that delved into similar themes.

Kiss and Tell by Michele Jaffe is about a boarding school girl named Miranda Kiss, student by day, Junior Wonder Woman by night. Oh, and in her spare time, she’s also a Roller Derby star (damn it, Candy, there goes my idea!). She has a crush on a local cop, Caleb Reynolds, who has a girlfriend and only thinks of her as some girl who has a crush on him. There’s also Will, with whom Miranda had one disastrous date and never called her again. In her despair, Miranda has begun reading How to Get—and Kiss!—Your Guy and is only getting more depressed about her love life. Her happy lesbian best friend Kenzi thinks she should be more confident about herself, but that’s the least of Miranda’s problems. She’s Super Girl: super hearing, super strength, super speed, maybe even a super hoohah (but this is a YA, yo!), and it’s kind of hard to be dating around when she’s got the tendency to drop everything and foil a mugging. On top of that, she also serves as a chauffeur for the owner of the Bee Girls, her roller derby team, and her latest assignment is a weird, out-of-this-world girl named Sibby who’s never had a donut, a hamburger, and plans to kiss twenty-five boys before the day is over. For some reason, everyone and his mother seem to be after this girl, and Miranda takes it upon herself to protect her. And if the two of them just happen to end up at the prom hiding from the bad guys and Miranda just happens to bump into her other crush, Will…

The dialogue in this story comes fast and clever. There are so many one-liners here, but there isn’t a sense that Jaffe is trying too hard like some other writers. This is the only story in this anthology that made me laugh out loud and that’s not a good thing because I was reading this in the middle of class. Miranda is a wonderful, fully fleshed out character. We see her insecurities, her strengths, her background… and I just really liked her. She’s very kickass, but also possesses a teenage girl’s esteem issues. The secondary characters are a hoot as well, especially Sibby, the girl Miranda has to take care of, and Miranda’s best friend, Kenzi, who likes to speak in acronyms. Though this story is pretty damned funny, there’s some suspense too. The chase scenes were awesome. I wish this thing was longer because Jaffe hints that there’s more to Miranda other than being a girl with superpowers (a bad guy calls her “Princess,” and I had a feeling he wasn’t just mocking her) and I really want to know more! I love superpowered heroines. Yay Wonder Woman!

…and finally, Stephanie Meyer’s Hell on Earth. Despite the mundane title, this really was the best of the five and there are some really good stories in this anthology. As you guys know, I totally adored Twilight and was really looking forward to this. Our hero Gabe is a good guy. The best guy. His date deserted him in the middle of prom to make out with some other dude and yet, he is more concerned about helping his friend get the confidence to ask his crush to dance. Gabe just likes to help, period. He was recently suspended from school for punching out a math teacher who was sexually harassing a ninth grader and is pretty much known as an all-around do-gooder. He doesn’t mind. Gabe luuuurves to help people. He feels compelled to make people feel better about themselves. He gets a little voice in his head that tells him when somebody needs help and… well, he does it. This time, however, Gabe doesn’t quite know who tell help first. People are punching each other, girls are making with boys who aren’t their prom dates, kids are fighting all over their place, and the entire prom just has a feeling of… wrongness that has nothing to do with the terrible DJ. The spidey sense that tells him who needs help, however, seems to be quite focused on Sheba, his best friend’s date. Sheba is seriously hot (she’s wearing red leather) and the new girl in school. There’s something wrong with the girl, but Gabe can’t quite figure her out.

Sheba, of course, is a demoness in disguise. Her mission of the evening is to wreck the prom and that includes mentally shoving other girls to make out with somebody else’s dates, inciting fights between boys, and seducing a boy into bringing a gun into the prom and shooting up the place. Yeah, Sheba isn’t misunderstood and she isn’t forced to do any of this stuff. SHE IS A DEMON. A real bad girl and she doesn’t back down for anyone. Sheba is having a fine time making things miserable for everyone and if it just happened to end up in bloodshed, all the better. The only person not having a bad time is Gabe, the do-gooder with the pretty angel eyes, and he seems just as motivated as she is to make prom a happy place for other people. Sheba means to destroy him and rip him into pieces… too bad he’s so damned cute. And those eyes…

Meyer’s contribution to this anthology felt the most… complete. Without info-dumping, Meyer sets up pretty good world-building and atmosphere. Gabe is delicious as the do-gooder. He reminded me a little bit of Christy Morrell, the yummy good boy hero from Patricia Gaffney’s To Love and to Cherish. Sheba, on the other hand, makes for a good foil as the bad girl who just wants to ruin prom for everyone. I really liked that she isn’t just some fake-jaded goth chick who thinks the world owes her something. She really IS evil. It’s awesome. I really liked the idea of this wicked, wicked girl getting all gooey over the cutest boy in school just like a “real” girl would. This story is the only one that takes the “prom night from hell” theme literally and it is delicious. Meyer does a good job of infusing the story with a feeling of dread and wrongness, but she was also really good at showing Sheba’s downfall by Gabe’s otherworldly hotness. ha-ha! I swear, this woman writes the most drool-worthy teenage boys and dear God, I need to take a shower after typing that.

God, this anthology was such a blast to read. I have to warn you, though, that not all of these stories are romances with standard happily ever afters. In fact, one has a decidedly NOT HAPPY ending and another has an “okay, my life sucks, but I’ll be okay” kind of ending. I really loved the whole “hell on earth” thing as an allegory for “high school is a frickin’ hellhole and I wish I were dead” angst that most teenagers go through. Good stuff. All of the stories are well-written and fun in their own way. If you’re a little tired of the usual vampire and werewolf stuff over-saturating the paranormal genre, definitely check this book out. It’s a lot of fun, it’s sexy, it’s wicked… oh, just go for it!

Peace, love, and snarkage,

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 10:00 am and is filed under Books, Grade: A, Romance: Anthology, Young Adult, Suspense/Horror. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.