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At age 7, Sophia was struck down with a life-threatening disease. Faced with a choice between an unending life in the body of a child and her otherwise certain death, Sophia's parents had her turned into a vampire.
Now, after 10 years of Christian home-schooling and near-total isolation, Sophia secretly plans on moving out the very night she turns 18. All her research, her online classes, and her natural curiosity have prepared Sophia mentally for the world she's about to dive head-first into, but no amount of research could prepare her heart for falling in love with Joshua, the first young man she sees after donating her corneas the next day.
Her faith in God and her desire to heal the sick gives Sophia the strength to persevere through the pain of donation after donation, and her vampirism gives her the ability to grow her organs back again and again, but Sophia finds herself unequipped to face her suddenly-awakened lusts of the flesh and the ache in her heart for a deep, reciprocated love. After a shocking and painful first date with Joshua, it doesn't take Sophia long to learn just how difficult the search for love can be, especially for a teenage vampire with a child's body and a strong desire to avoid falling into sin.
Sophia is one of two books in the duology Never Let the Right One Go, which shows two apparently conflicting views of the same supernatural world by looking through the eyes of two very different teenage girls in their pursuit of love. Don't miss Emily, the other half of the picture, and a completely contrary take on everything you think you know.
Now, after 10 years of Christian home-schooling and near-total isolation, Sophia secretly plans on moving out the very night she turns 18. All her research, her online classes, and her natural curiosity have prepared Sophia mentally for the world she's about to dive head-first into, but no amount of research could prepare her heart for falling in love with Joshua, the first young man she sees after donating her corneas the next day.
Her faith in God and her desire to heal the sick gives Sophia the strength to persevere through the pain of donation after donation, and her vampirism gives her the ability to grow her organs back again and again, but Sophia finds herself unequipped to face her suddenly-awakened lusts of the flesh and the ache in her heart for a deep, reciprocated love. After a shocking and painful first date with Joshua, it doesn't take Sophia long to learn just how difficult the search for love can be, especially for a teenage vampire with a child's body and a strong desire to avoid falling into sin.
Sophia is one of two books in the duology Never Let the Right One Go, which shows two apparently conflicting views of the same supernatural world by looking through the eyes of two very different teenage girls in their pursuit of love. Don't miss Emily, the other half of the picture, and a completely contrary take on everything you think you know.
- GenresAudiobook
208 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 11, 2012
About the author
Teel McClanahan
33 books36 followersTeel is happily married to an English teacher and they live together in Phoenix, AZ with a grumpy old cat, a skittish young cat, and thousands of books, both read and to-be-read. Virtual Danger is Teel’s nineteenth book, and there are plenty more trying to work their way into this world through the aperture of Teel's imagination, hoping to be found and loved by readers like you. Interestingly, none of the others are books in The Death Noodle Glitterfairy Robot Saga—yet.
Teel is an independent author, artist, creative visionary, blogger, publisher, podcaster, and sometimes filmmaker. You can find out more about him and his other stories, novels, poetry and more by visiting Modern Evil Press.
Teel is an independent author, artist, creative visionary, blogger, publisher, podcaster, and sometimes filmmaker. You can find out more about him and his other stories, novels, poetry and more by visiting Modern Evil Press.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 12, 2019
This reads like a book written for a pretty extreme Christian audiance. If you are a young, American Christian girl you might enjoy it. Otherwise I wouldnt bother. The book is littered with bible quotes and messages about how a good Christian girl should live. The only real angst and troubles are around the "evils of sex" and how to get your friends to pray for you. It's also typical of a very US - centric mind set. Of course a vampire over 2000 years old would live in small town USA right? It doesnt get anywhere near the books the author says he used as inspiration.
I'll start the next one and see how I go. If you were looking for a book about a young vampire, do yourself a favour and go straight to "let the right on in" and dont bother with this.
I'll start the next one and see how I go. If you were looking for a book about a young vampire, do yourself a favour and go straight to "let the right on in" and dont bother with this.
May 17, 2012
I read Sophia after I read its companion Emily. While certainly more of a Utopian look at the same society Emily lives in, this is not a book full of butterflies and happiness. It made me the most uncomfortable of the two books. For that reason and a few others I enjoyed it more than I did Emily.
Where Emily is human, Sophia is a vampire. In Teel’s world, people who have life threatening illness or injuries are given the option of becoming a vampire. When she was seven years old, Sophia came down with just such an illness and her parents made the difficult decision to have her turned. They raised her in a sheltered and very religious home, keeping her away from society for a variety of reasons. Her body stopped aging, but her mind continued and when she turned eighteen she was granted adulthood and given all of the advantages vampires in this society have.
Emily deals with politics and what a world with vampires would look like in that arena. Sophia is a look at religion and how that would be affected by creatures with “eternal” life. Those of you that know me, would know that this is precisely my bailiwick. Sophia is a devout Christian and believes that her vampiric state is blessed by God and she’s to use it in the same way humans would use theirs. Vampires can regenerate organs, so she enters the donor program, giving large parts of her body to human children who are in need of transplants. She also donates her blood so that its healing properties can be used in medicines. In addition to serving humanity, Sophia also wants to go to college and finally get a chance to grow up.
Sadly for her, happily for us, things rapidly get complicated. She discovers that while she has access to a vast wealth that has been building throughout her life, she also discovers that being an adult trapped in a child’s body increases the number of complications she faces a hundred fold. One of the primary ways that surfaces is in her relationships. Sophia’s sex drive blossoms (though I find myself asking why that didn’t come up earlier, perhaps due to her sheltered life) and this results in two scenes that made my skin crawl. I won’t go into detail but one is physically painful for the protagonist and is somewhat explicit, and the other explains the pedophilia tag on Smashwords (though nothing graphic is portrayed/described). Yup, when you’re a vampire in a kid’s body you get to looking for love in some VERY wrong places.
Watching Sophia grow as a character and come to terms with her various natures was fascinating. Along the way, she meets one of her Kindred that physically walked with Christ, makes some reals friends, and in the biggest crossover between the two books, meets Nicholas. We see a different side of the anti-vampire zealot and that’s interesting too. To me, this is a far more interesting book that Emily was and kept me hooked in the entire time. For that, I’m awarding it five stars. It is available from Amazon, Smashwords, direct from the author, and other fine e-book retailers.
I can’t leave it at that though. Teel wanted to do something really interesting with these two stories and he succeeded. Part of me wishes that I could erase my experience, go back, and read these in the opposite order to see what difference that makes. WIth time, I will go back and do just that. I take these two works as a whole. This is one instance where the whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts. So, in spite of Emily’s shortcomings (few though they were) I give the whole five stars as well. I urge you to pick both of these books up and read them in the order of your choosing. Either way I think you’re in for a great read.
Where Emily is human, Sophia is a vampire. In Teel’s world, people who have life threatening illness or injuries are given the option of becoming a vampire. When she was seven years old, Sophia came down with just such an illness and her parents made the difficult decision to have her turned. They raised her in a sheltered and very religious home, keeping her away from society for a variety of reasons. Her body stopped aging, but her mind continued and when she turned eighteen she was granted adulthood and given all of the advantages vampires in this society have.
Emily deals with politics and what a world with vampires would look like in that arena. Sophia is a look at religion and how that would be affected by creatures with “eternal” life. Those of you that know me, would know that this is precisely my bailiwick. Sophia is a devout Christian and believes that her vampiric state is blessed by God and she’s to use it in the same way humans would use theirs. Vampires can regenerate organs, so she enters the donor program, giving large parts of her body to human children who are in need of transplants. She also donates her blood so that its healing properties can be used in medicines. In addition to serving humanity, Sophia also wants to go to college and finally get a chance to grow up.
Sadly for her, happily for us, things rapidly get complicated. She discovers that while she has access to a vast wealth that has been building throughout her life, she also discovers that being an adult trapped in a child’s body increases the number of complications she faces a hundred fold. One of the primary ways that surfaces is in her relationships. Sophia’s sex drive blossoms (though I find myself asking why that didn’t come up earlier, perhaps due to her sheltered life) and this results in two scenes that made my skin crawl. I won’t go into detail but one is physically painful for the protagonist and is somewhat explicit, and the other explains the pedophilia tag on Smashwords (though nothing graphic is portrayed/described). Yup, when you’re a vampire in a kid’s body you get to looking for love in some VERY wrong places.
Watching Sophia grow as a character and come to terms with her various natures was fascinating. Along the way, she meets one of her Kindred that physically walked with Christ, makes some reals friends, and in the biggest crossover between the two books, meets Nicholas. We see a different side of the anti-vampire zealot and that’s interesting too. To me, this is a far more interesting book that Emily was and kept me hooked in the entire time. For that, I’m awarding it five stars. It is available from Amazon, Smashwords, direct from the author, and other fine e-book retailers.
I can’t leave it at that though. Teel wanted to do something really interesting with these two stories and he succeeded. Part of me wishes that I could erase my experience, go back, and read these in the opposite order to see what difference that makes. WIth time, I will go back and do just that. I take these two works as a whole. This is one instance where the whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts. So, in spite of Emily’s shortcomings (few though they were) I give the whole five stars as well. I urge you to pick both of these books up and read them in the order of your choosing. Either way I think you’re in for a great read.
April 10, 2012
(Disclosure: I was a First Reader, that is, I read this book before publication in order to give the author feedback.)
What Teel has done here is take a few of the common vampire tropes such as ability to heal, superhuman strength and speed, and being "stopped" at the age they were when turned, added one that's (I think) less common - vampire blood healing humans - and treated it all science-fictionally. I think it succeeds, and it succeeds because he does with it what I want my speculative fiction to do: it tells the story of how that difference from our world affects the lives of ordinary people.
In this case, the ordinary person is Sophia, a now 18-year-old vampire still in the 7-year-old body in which she was turned in order to save her life. Brought up in a church which considers vampires recipients of the "first resurrection", she's always had the expectation that she'll donate her organs to other children to prevent them from ending up in the same situation, even though that's incredibly painful for her.
Even more painful, though, is trying to date when you look like a 7-year-old. You end up either being rejected by people who don't want to look like paedophiles, or being stalked by actual paedophiles, all the while trying to be respected as a woman. (I remarked to Teel that he's carried off the difficult feat of writing a vampire novel in which the undead drinking human blood is one of the least creepy things going on.)
The theological discussions, while a little dry, remind me very much of the real discussions I had myself at the same age. And the dilemmas of Sophia drew me in and had me cheering for her.
What Teel has done here is take a few of the common vampire tropes such as ability to heal, superhuman strength and speed, and being "stopped" at the age they were when turned, added one that's (I think) less common - vampire blood healing humans - and treated it all science-fictionally. I think it succeeds, and it succeeds because he does with it what I want my speculative fiction to do: it tells the story of how that difference from our world affects the lives of ordinary people.
In this case, the ordinary person is Sophia, a now 18-year-old vampire still in the 7-year-old body in which she was turned in order to save her life. Brought up in a church which considers vampires recipients of the "first resurrection", she's always had the expectation that she'll donate her organs to other children to prevent them from ending up in the same situation, even though that's incredibly painful for her.
Even more painful, though, is trying to date when you look like a 7-year-old. You end up either being rejected by people who don't want to look like paedophiles, or being stalked by actual paedophiles, all the while trying to be respected as a woman. (I remarked to Teel that he's carried off the difficult feat of writing a vampire novel in which the undead drinking human blood is one of the least creepy things going on.)
The theological discussions, while a little dry, remind me very much of the real discussions I had myself at the same age. And the dilemmas of Sophia drew me in and had me cheering for her.
June 11, 2012
3.5 / no spoilers
Sophia was changed into a vampire at the age of 7 to save her life. Now she has just turned 18 and moves out to make her own way in the world. The vampires are "out". They've help advance the world, mostly by donating their healing blood and donating organs and limbs (which grow back for them).
Because her parents home-schooled her, kept her away from other vampires, and subscribe to a very religious lifestyle, Sophia's launch into adulthood is very interesting and sometimes disturbing, to say the least. Her attempts to find romance as an 18yr old in a 7yr old body left me amused, creeped out, anxious, and borderline sad for her.
Religion: Even though I don't share the beliefs of the main character Emily and am in fact very sensitive to the subject, I didn't feel like the author was using this book as a platform to preach to the reader. It was just a characteristic of Sophia that significantly shaped her behavior and the situations in which she found herself. Even though that isn't my cup of tea, I was interested enough to see what became of her.
Sophia was changed into a vampire at the age of 7 to save her life. Now she has just turned 18 and moves out to make her own way in the world. The vampires are "out". They've help advance the world, mostly by donating their healing blood and donating organs and limbs (which grow back for them).
Because her parents home-schooled her, kept her away from other vampires, and subscribe to a very religious lifestyle, Sophia's launch into adulthood is very interesting and sometimes disturbing, to say the least. Her attempts to find romance as an 18yr old in a 7yr old body left me amused, creeped out, anxious, and borderline sad for her.
Religion: Even though I don't share the beliefs of the main character Emily and am in fact very sensitive to the subject, I didn't feel like the author was using this book as a platform to preach to the reader. It was just a characteristic of Sophia that significantly shaped her behavior and the situations in which she found herself. Even though that isn't my cup of tea, I was interested enough to see what became of her.
July 27, 2012
Don't know where to begin with this book, along with its companion work "Emily, never let the right one go" it is an amazing work of fiction. Extremly thought provoking and deep. The characters are well thought out and explored and there is a look at the issues thrown up by Vampire and Human interaction on levels I have never considered or read about before.
The books are fantasticly enjoyable and work really well, love the writing style and the whole format and presentation.
Can't recomend this enough!
The books are fantasticly enjoyable and work really well, love the writing style and the whole format and presentation.
Can't recomend this enough!
April 15, 2012
This book is great! An interesting twist on the standard vampire novel. Full of teenage romance and more well written then any sparkly vampires. We watch Sophia figure out adulthood after leaving the very secluded life her parents raised her in. I couldn't put the book down. It is a good quick read.
January 15, 2013
Interesting premiss, I'm glad the ending is what it is.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews