Vamped by Lucienne Diver

Title: Vamped	Loved it	Graded
Author: Lucienne Diver
Genre: Paranormal
Publisher: Flux
Elements: Vampires
Series: Book 1 of a series

Top Five Perks of the Vamp Life
1. Eternal youth and beauty rocks!
2. Free clothes. Hey, might as well embrace the dark side.
3. Going vamp turns geeks, like my new boyfriend Bobby, into studs.
4. No need to breathe, except when a dramatic sigh or a heaving chest is called for.
5. Superhuman powers, like I can totally spot a hot Versace skirt a mile away - literally!

Top Five Drags of Vamping Out
1. No reflection! Oh well, I'll just have to sire my own entourage to confirm my hotness.
2. An all-liquid diet and no tanning options.
3. This vampy queen Mellisande who's taken an interest in my boyfriend.
4. Pointy-stick phobia.
5. Getting locked up by skanky Mellisande, who's transforming the entire high school into her own personal vampire army. The nerve!

I’m used to vampire books that are full of brooding main characters, bemoaning their lack of soul, life and friends. Vamped was different.

Usually, this would be a good thing.

Readers are first introduced to Gina as she wakes up and finds herself stuck in a coffin. She doesn’t panic, and after some quick thinking, deduces that she is dead and now a vampire. The obvious conclusion: if she’s dead and not a zombie, she’s definitely a vampire. Right?

After clawing her way out, she meets Bobby, the chess geek turned hottie who turned her into a vampire unintentionally after their one and only make out session. Their relationship was unrealistic to me, with them somehow claiming ownership of one another, and initially nothing other than that one make out session to call a "relationship".

Things take a turn for the worst as Mellisande, or “Smelly Melli” as Gina calls her, kidnaps both of them in her plot to have her very own vampire army, located under… wait for it… the high school.

I’ll stop here and say that I had to put Vamped down a few times just to get over the whole feeling of absurdness. It’s not the plot, the plot was fantastic. Another time, I would have loved the whole plot about an undead fashionista trying to save the world. It was reminiscent of the Queen Betsy “Undead and Un…” series by MaryJanice Davidson, except that the protagonist was a teenager in high school instead of a female in her twenties. It wasn’t the writing either. The writing and dialogue were witty and there were some good laugh out loud moments when I went “Oh, snap!”.

It was the characters and lack of a backstory.

One of the main things that matter to me when reading a story is the characters. How do the main characters interact with the other characters? How do they interact with their surroundings? How do they react when they are thrust in new situations?

No matter how good the writing is, how stellar the plot, it's not enough if the characters are flat, one dimensional and don’t have any sort of growth over the length of the story. And to see if there is growth in a character, there needs to be a backstory.

I couldn’t see any sort of growth in either Gina or Bobby, or between Gina and Bobby. This is mostly due to the lack of backstory for me to relate to. What I did see was that Gina took the initiative to stand up for herself and lead a revolution while the others just sat down and took what was given to them. But without something to compare to see whether she improved from when she was alive, or if she was naturally a leader, it just felt lacking and left me feeling out of sorts.