Generation V (Generation V, #1) in Read, Reading, Planning to Read and More

Jan 06, 2014 Waverly rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: urban-fantasy, vampires

Fortitude Scott is a recent graduate from an ivy league college, and like many recent college graduates, he finds himself in a holding pattern without a plan for what comes next. He's the youngest of three siblings and comes from an extremely wealthy family. Though their estate is nearby, he resists moving home, asserting his independence by living on the wages of a minimum wage job instead. This means a terrible apartment with a lousy roommate, a steady diet of ramen noodles, and shoes held tog Fortitude Scott is a recent graduate from an ivy league college, and like many recent college graduates, he finds himself in a holding pattern without a plan for what comes next. He's the youngest of three siblings and comes from an extremely wealthy family. Though their estate is nearby, he resists moving home, asserting his independence by living on the wages of a minimum wage job instead. This means a terrible apartment with a lousy roommate, a steady diet of ramen noodles, and shoes held together by duct tape.

However, when Fort gets thoroughly beaten up in a back alley, his family hires a bodyguard whether he wants one or not. Suzume, a kitsune fox who can turn into a human, breezes into the story as the hired muscle and manipulates Fort with infuriating ease. In fact, if his college had a class in Confrontation Avoidance, he would have aced it. His roommate and his girlfriend treat him like a door mat, making it hard to see how a kick ass urban fantasy heroine would respect him.

He has a good reason for being wary of confrontation in general, though, and violence in particular. Brennan delivers a fresh and utterly creepy take on vampires as we learn more about the Scott family. Imagine Fort, a guy in his twenties, with an octogenarian Queen Elizabeth as his mother. The matriarch of the domineering Scott family would have been a spry girl when Edward III was king of England in the fourteenth century, but Madeline's extraordinarily long life is progressing toward a natural death from old age. Her oldest child, Prudence, is centuries old and a sociopath. Chivalry, the middle child, grew up during the American Civil War. He has strong emotional ties to his wife and his much younger brother, but he is utterly perplexed by the moral ideas of right and wrong when strangers are involved. Fort is therefore unique in having a strong sense of conscience, and he dreads becoming a full vampire if it means losing human compassion.

Fort seems weak in the early chapters for putting up with a girlfriend who sleeps around and a freeloader roommate who hasn't paid rent in months. But a different picture of Fort emerges as the reader learns about his back story, including an intense scene of childhood trauma and revelations about the horrific process required to conceive vampire children such as Fort and his siblings.

When a vampire named Luca arrives from Europe, and receives permission to hunt during his visit to Madeline's territory, the Scotts are ambivalent when the pedophile preys upon local children and discards murdered corpses. Fortitude might have a hard time standing up for himself, but he will not give up when a child's life hangs in the balance. Fort's kitsune bodyguard, the mischievous, foxy Suzume, is not contractually obliged to back him up when Fort strikes off on a suicidal mission to save the little girl being abused and held hostage by Luca. Is the life of one stranger, a short-lived mortal, worth risking your own life?

Great book!

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