Randomly Reading...Fateful by Claudia Gray!

This one turned up when I was helping a young lady in my Book Club with her binge of Evernight vampire novels. I'd forgotten about it. I only ever got around to reading two of the Evernight books, though I quite liked them. They took place in a school for youthful vampires who needed to be kept up to date so as to continue passing for ordinary teenagers in a world very different from the one into which they had been born(one of them was a boy from Saxon England!). There were a few human students there and they were out of bounds - you want to bite something, you go out into the woods and catch an animal, thanks!

And the author visited Australia at one stage and gave a free talk at the Melbourne branch of Dymock's Bookshop, so of course I went. I think that might have been the one to which I took three students, Brittany, Taylor and Paige, who were fans of YA vampire fiction. She stepped up on the tiny stage, ordered, "Look scared!" and snapped a photo for her blog. I was one of only two who followed orders, so if you find that page I'm one of the two scared people in the audience.

She was finishing off Fateful at the time and that was when the Titanic exhibition was on in Melbourne, so she went. I did too, and wow, what a cruise that would have been for the rich people, if it hadn't ended in tragedy! According to the heroine of this novel, even third class was not too bad, though you did have to share a four-bunk cabin, potentially with strangers, something YHA backpackers would be quite comfortable with. I got my photo taken at the "Grand Staircase" and goggled at the luxurious stuff that they managed to pull up from the bottom of the sea. You were given a boarding pass with the name of a real passenger, then at the end of the exhibition there was a wall with the passengers' names and you found out if yours had survived or not. I think mine was second class and, remarkably, survived.

Fateful is set on the Titanic. With werewolves yet! I'm only a few chapters in, but the heroine, a ladies' maid called Tess, is already being stalked by a scary character called Mikhail, and has fallen in love with a rich boy called Alec, who has,so far, saved her twice from Mikhail. As it's in first person, I'm going to assume she survives...

More to tell you later!