Masquerade by Melissa de la Cruz (pp. 320)

The second installment of the Blue Bloods series is like candy. It’s bad for you, filled with some marginal ingredients, but still leaves you with a smile on your face and wanting another piece. Like many young adult series authors and fantasy series writers, it’s hard to find the start and stop of a cohesive plot or plots. Larger ideas are thrown in out of the blue and what feels like major plot lines are just mini-episodes to add some drama to the world the author is creating.

Here Schuyler Van Alen goes looking for her long exiled grandfather in search of answers about the mysterious Silver Bloods. De la Cruz does a good job of making her own vampire rules. The mythology she entwines with fallen angels and devils continues to be interesting. The concept of remembered past lives in the vampires, so that they may live many lifetimes instead of one continuous lifetime is quite clever and really the element that pulls you through wanting to read more.

As an adult reader of a YA book, some of the mean girl characters and relationships make zero sense and the blatant materialism in clothing is annoying and frustrating. But overall its mythology and twists on the vampire –genre continue to make it a fun series. Highly recommended for anyone who’s run out of Sookie Stackhouse / True Blood books to read.