Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side

Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side
Beth Fantaskey
315 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Source: purchased ebook
★★★☆☆

You can read the Goodreads summary here.

Jessica is just your average high schooler, doing her own thing, when one day she notices a mysterious young man at the bus stop with her.  When she sees him again in school she starts to wonder.  As it turns out, she was adopted as a young girl from Romania, but before she left the country she was betrothed to this young man, Lucius, who has now come to claim her as his vampire wife!

This novel was not quite what I was expecting, particularly in that Jessica and Lucius never really... date.  They have a sexual tension though, that cuts through the pages and made me keep reading.  Either she was not liking him, or he was not liking her, but deep down they were both loving each other.  They just couldn't get it together!

The plot itself had me going from page one, when Jessica is waiting for the bus on the way to school and sees a mysterious young man watching her... dressed in a cape!  The whole thing really intrigued me and I plowed through the first portion of the novel.  Unfortunately, by the end I was getting a little frustrated with the character's flip-flopping opinions of each other that I was over it.

I enjoyed the short chapters and the pace of the novel overall.  I also thought Lucius' letters were a great addition to the book; they really helped show some of the plot from his point of view.

Three stars!  I hate to say it, but hardcore lovers of Twilight are going to love this book too, which I thought was a bit of a cross between the whole Twilight series and The Princess Diaries.