Companions of the Night. By
Vivian Vande Velde. Magic Carpet/Harcourt. $6.99.
Flora series #3: Flora’s Fury—How
a Girl of Spirit and a Red Dog Confound Their Friends, Astound Their Enemies,
and Learn the Importance of Packing Light. By Ysabeau S. Wilce. Harcourt.
$17.99.
Elements of Vivian
Vande Velde’s teen-vampire adventure, Companions
of the Night, seem so charmingly old-fashioned that it is hard to realize
that the book is not all that old: it was originally published in 1995. Yet here are unwieldy video cameras requiring
a search for batteries; easily accessible pay phones, not only in a 24-hour
laundry but also near the “beverage-container return center” in a supermarket,
with calls to Information being free and connecting to a human operator; tapes
and records as well as CDs for music, and not an MP3 player in sight, much less
an iPod; archaic-if-not-quite obsolete comments such as, “her voice was
trembling as though she were talking through the spinning blades of an electric
fan”; and computing from a time when there were online bulletin boards and a computer
“made the distinctive high-pitched squeals that indicated it was attached to a
modem.” It is amazing to realize how
many little details of everyday life, intended to set a scene of ordinariness
against which the supernatural adventures of 16-year-old Kerry Nowicki can be
played out, now seem exotic, or at least like revenants from a time long
gone. Not that long in chronological terms, true, but ages and ages ago
experientially. Readers ages 12 and up,
for whom this book is intended, will likely be the ones most taken aback by
passing references to elements of life with which they are, at most, barely
acquainted. Other parts of the book,
though, will be easier for 21st-century teens to understand, since
they continue to be elements of books written today: the irritating little
brother who has a key role to play in the plot (and in this case actually is
responsible for it), the single-parent family (here, Kerry and her brother,
Ian, who is a barely believable 12 years younger, live with their father, their
mother having deserted them), and so on.
In any case, readers will find it easy to bypass anything unfamiliar,
focus on anything easy to understand, and stay with the twisty and well-paced
plot, because the writing is simple and easy to follow and the events pile upon
each other with satisfying speed and sufficient complexity to keep things very
interesting indeed. At the center of
them, and increasingly at the center of Kerry’s world, is Ethan Bryne, a very
attractive boy who is apparently a college student but just may be a
vampire. At least that is what the
vampire hunters who capture him think when they bring him, rather improbably,
to a 24-hour coin laundry (why not to someplace more private?) to await the
dawn. Kerry is in the laundry, searching
for her little brother’s lost stuffed koala, when the hunters and Ethan show
up, and she is soon responsible for helping Ethan escape – setting in motion everything
from danger to her father and brother to a slow-but-steady set of revelations
about vampires being real and Ethan perhaps being one of them after all. A romance between Kerry and Ethan is
inevitable, and in fact she is attracted to him from the first – even though he
is tied up, beaten and bloody when they meet.
But Kerry soon finds out that she cannot trust Ethan, who eventually
admits that killing is pleasurable – and who might turn on her the minute he
doesn't need her. Still, Kerry, like many
teens from time immemorial, is attracted to Ethan’s bad-boy persona, which is
laced with seductive elements that do not, however, lead to a straightforward
happy ending. Instead, the novel finishes
with a cliffhanger of sorts, or at least with a chance for readers to make
their own decisions about what might happen next. The conclusion seems to imply a sequel, but
there hasn’t been one yet, so Companions
of the Night turns out to be a more ambiguous vampire story than many of
those written in the years since it first appeared.
Another 16-year-old
protagonist, Flora Fyrdraaca, faces supernatural hurdles of a different kind –
in fact, of many different kinds. This
is the third book about Flora, and it is emphatically not for anyone who is unfamiliar with the first two: Flora Segunda and Flora’s Dare. In fact, some
readers who are familiar with the
first books may nevertheless be thrown a bit by this one, because there is so much going on. Flora lives in a world with equal parts of
militarism and “magick,” and with distinct parallels to our own; for example,
her adoptive mother is military leader of Califa (as in California), and Flora
is being hunted by assassins dispatched by the Huitzils (who sound, and are,
vaguely Aztec). Flora is supposed to
escort the Infanta home from Huitzil territory, but would rather search for her
maybe-dead-but-maybe-still-alive birth mother, known as Tiny Doom. And Flora is surrounded by all sorts of
peculiar characters, as the book’s lengthy subtitle helps to make clear. Among them are two boys whom she cannot
decide whether to date or fight: her BFF Udo and a delivery-boy
shapeshifter. There are also a small
octopus containing the ghost of Flora’s grandfather, a stuffed pink pig and the
Dainty Pirates. And others. As for Flora herself, she is determined to
learn how to use her magick, which requires her to find out, first of all, how
not to blow herself up. Flora’s father
and adoptive mother love, worry about and want to protect her, but Flora (for
reasons never quite made clear) resents their concern and attention. As she tries to make it (whatever “it” may
be) on her own, Flora falls into an unending series of adventures in which
anyone – ghost, politician, innkeeper – can turn out to be friend or enemy,
without the reader getting a great deal of help in figuring out who is who and
which is which. There is also a common
plot device that Ysabeau S. Wilce badly overuses here: people keeping important
secrets from each other for no real reason except to further the story. Flora’s
Fury is over-plotted, over-cute, over-quirky and over-determined to be
inventive and madcap. Even existing fans
of the series may find themselves wanting it simply to be over. But it isn’t – the series isn’t, that is –
because it is clear from the end of this novel that there are more to
come. There is enough fun in Flora’s Fury to earn the book a (+++)
rating for readers who enjoyed the two earlier ones and don’t mind trying to
knit together an awful lot of plot threads with only minimal authorial
assistance. But potential readers who
have not yet encountered Flora should definitely stay away until they have read
the earlier stories of her derring-do.
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