Blood Moon by Alyxandra Harvey. London, Bloomsbury, 2012

This is the fifth in Alyxandra Harvey's Drake Chronicles,about the likeable Drake family, vampire couple Liam and Helena and their eight children. The Drake children are human till their sixteenth birthdays, then turn - if they're lucky and don't die in the process. Frankly, I don't know how someone who is technically dead could have sex let alone produce children, but this series has been so entertaining I was happy to suspend disbelief. With luck, cheerful scientist Uncle Geoffrey Drake will be able to work it out and explain it before the end of the series. The Drakes don't kill anyone with the possible exception of Hel-Blar, unlucky vampires who have been infected with something that turns them blue, gives them extra sets of fangs and makes them insane, causing them to attack anything that moves, including each other. Actually, the vampires in the district of Violet Hill, which has as many scary beings as Sunnydale, tend to carry stakes and crossbows as a matter of routine.

If you haven't been following this series but would like to, stop here and read the first four novels, without which this one will make no sense. If you have, you'll know that at the cliffhanger end of Bleeding Hearts Drake daughter Solange attacked her human boyfriend, Kieran. Now she is starting to act even stranger, allowing herself to be persuaded to drink blood from the veins of "bloodslaves", humans who have an addiction to being bitten, who offer their blood freely to vampires, and listening to an inner voice that may not be herself. Much can happen during Blood Moon, an international vampire conference happening in sleepy Violet Hill. These vamps have political disagreements, from whether or not vampires should co-operate with the vampire-hunting organisation Helios-Ra, which stays away from vampires who don't kill anyone, to who should be in charge. The only thing keeping them from going for each other's jugulars is the fact that the penalty is staking.

This series, till now, has had plenty of humour, which is what attracted me to it; as a teacher-librarian who reads a lot of YA fiction, including stacks of paranormal romance, I am relieved to find a series whose author is clearly a Buffy fan and whose characters have wit and charm. This novel still has some humour, mostly in the chapters seen from the viewpoint of Lucy,  Solange's human best friend, who is now at the Helios Ra high school which, believe it or not, has an annual senior prom( Lucy wonders if they wear glittery cargo pants on the night). But on the whole it's becoming darker - much darker. One of the characters is tortured. Solange is not her usual self though she is horrified at what she did to Kieran. Lucy is hit on the head a number of times(and seems to recover rather quickly). And the novel ends on another cliffhanger, with some unexplained matters that had me saying, "Hang on, how did he...?"

I have no doubt that my students who have been following the series will pounce on this with cries of glee and enjoy it very much. I preferred the humour, but at least there are no soppy heroines clinging to their vampire boyfriends, unless the bloodslaves are a sendup of regular paranormal heroines, which, from what I have seen in this author's other books, wouldn't surprise me.

And the good news is that after that cliffhanger is a Drake Chronicles novelette, "Lost Girls," which shows the sixteen year old Helena, who has just met Liam. Helena is a street kid, something I wouldn't have expected, but it does show her as a gutsy young fighter who is a member of a girl gang that hunts vampires who have been killing girls in her town. We also meet the young Scottish bikie Bruno, one day to be the Drakes' security chief; he is just twenty. The book is worth getting for this story alone.

OUT FOR BLOOD: Volume 3 Drake Chronicles. By Alyxandra Harvey London: Bloomsbury, 2010

This is the third novel in the series about the peaceful vampire family, the Drakes, and the humans in their lives (or should that be their undeaths?) In this universe, you can be turned, but you can also be born to the vampire state, although you don’t change states until you’re sixteen. The Drake family has a born-vampire father, a mother who turned by choice and is now queen of the local vampire tribe, a single daughter, Solange, and seven gorgeous sons, two of whom are dating human girls, one a kick-ass vampire girl, while Solange’s boyfriend Kieran is not only human but a hereditary vampire-hunter. Fortunately, the Drakes have made a treaty with the vampire-hunting society, the Helios-Ra. Not everyone on either side agrees with this treaty, which is probably a good thing for the purposes of the storylines or there would be no more novels in the series.

The entire series, so far, has been set over a fairly short time, only a few weeks. Each one takes up shortly after the last. Each novel is seen from the viewpoints of different characters.

This one is seen alternately from the viewpoint of Quinn Drake, the fourth son, and Hunter Wild, a Helios-Ra girl who appeared briefly in the previous novel and is teasingly called Buffy by Quinn. For the first time, we see inside the school where the young hereditary vampire-slayers are trained.

Hunter has been at the school for four years and is just finishing up, but just when she’s falling in love with the annoyingly attractive Quinn, who has a huge number of groupies, she finds that something strange is going on at the Heios-Ra Academy. There are unexpected attacks by the truly horrible Hel-Blar vampires (they’re blue and insane). Students are coming down with mysterious illnesses. Someone is handing out “vitamin” tablets that may be more than vitamins.

Can Hunter and her friends stop it in time? Can she get Quinn’s attention away from all those other girls - and will it matter if she and the others don’t stop whatever is happening at the school?

What do you think?

This series is a lot of fun, unlike many other vampire romances. There’s certainly enough romance to keep girls reading, but the heroines of these stories are not the standard maiden-in-distress. They kick ass. Even Hunter’s girly room-mate, Chloe, is a computer hacker genius. The gorgeous Drake brothers are turned on by strong women, possibly because their mother is one.

The girls will enjoy this one as much as the others. I can’t wait to put it in my library, where the first two books are almost always out on loan.

BLOOD FEUD By Alyxandra Harvey. London: Bloomsbury, 2010.

This is a sequel to My Love Lies Bleeding, set only a few days later. The vampire Drake family are now the royal family of the vampire community – that part of it, of course, which is not connected with the Hounds, the Host or the nutty Hel-Blar. The Host, led by evil vampire Montmartre, has been trying to capture Solange, now Princess Solange, the only girl born to her family in nine hundred years, so that Montmartre can be the next king. In the last novel, Solange managed to survive her change to vampire state (it’s a genetic thing in her family) with the help of her friend Lucy, a vampire hunter who became Solange’s boyfriend and a party of Hounds, led by French girl Isabeau St Croix.

Isabeau, as we learn in this book, had survived the French Revolution and her time in the streets of Paris, only to be turned into a vampire in London, by evil British vampiric earl, Greyhaven, who had then left her buried for two hundred years before she was rescued by the Hounds and brought to America (in this world, vampires don’t seem to have any special problems with crossing water, any more than they vanish from mirrors). The previous novel was centred around Solange and Lucy; this one is about the blossoming romance between Isabeau and Solange’s brother Logan.

Montmartre hasn’t given up, of course. And Isabeau discovers that Greyhaven is still around and helping him.

The author has taken trouble over vampire culture and legend. I suppose there would be some if vampires were born as well as made. Some things I found a little strange. The Hound culture seems to be very ancient, connected with female shamans – shamankas – and dogs, but, though it’s set in America, there doesn’t seem to be any Native American connection.

Of course, there were people in North America before the Native Americans – they may have been responsible for killing off all the prehistoric animals whose remains have been found. Maybe they were even vampires – who knows? But the Hounds seem to speak Welsh! This needs some explanation and perhaps this will happen in the next novel. And I’d like to know how genetic vampires age. The family matriarch, a mediaeval Frenchwoman, is still around, somewhere, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone else that old. Isabeau still looks eighteen, but she was turned. Will Logan stay eighteen? Will his mother stay Queen forever unless someone stakes her? It’s no wonder Tolkien made an “out” for his immortal Elves, or they, too, would have had the problem of Mum and Dad being around forever, telling you what to do! (As it was, 2000-year-old Arwen still had to do her father’s bidding).

Never mind. The series is fun. It takes itself a whole lot less seriously than many others of this genre. Logan is turned on by the fact that Isabeau can really kick butt. And vampires stake each other! Isabeau rolls her eyes at those pretentious vampires who carry polished stakes, when her comrades just sharpen sticks. There are cheeky references to such things as Buffy The Vampire Slayer, though there are probably a lot of teenagers out there who haven’t heard of Buffy(Pity about that).

The first book has been popular in my library and I have every intention of putting this one in as well. In fact, there's a student waiting for it right now...

MY LOVE LIES BLEEDING By Alyxandra Harvey. London: Bloomsbury, 2010

Lucy and Solange have been friends since childhood. Lucy’s parents are hippyish New Agers who make her eat tofu. Solange has a large number of gorgeous brothers, including the especially yummy Nicholas. Solange’s parents have always been good to Lucy. So far, so teen romance. Only one problem: Solange’s family are vampires.

Hey, it’s a medical thing. You’re born with it, though it doesn’t take effect till your sixteenth birthday, around when you hit puberty (perhaps immortal vampires hit puberty late). If you survive it, you become immortal and lose your ability to go out by day or eat anything but blood and maybe human flesh if you’re a nasty vampire. Otherwise, you just die. And Solange’s sixteenth birthday is fast approaching. As the only girl born in her family in 900 years, she’s the subject of a prophecy, which means any number of bounty hunters have been sent after her, as the vampire queen, Lady Natasha, doesn’t want any threat to her power.

And then there’s a secret society of vampire hunters called the Helios Ra, who might consider breaking their treaty with Solange’s family, who don’t kill humans (and why would they when their pheromones just allow them to seduce people and when there are blood banks for emergencies?)

While this is an entertaining teen romance with a variation, plenty of strong female characters and ass-kicking, I don’t think it’s any threat to Stephenie Meyer, if only because it’s so short. It may be a small snack for fans of the Twilight saga who have run out of reading material. Mind you, what with the number of teen vampire romances out now, they’re unlikely to run out any time soon.

As a grumpy old librarian who reads a lot of spec fic, though, I have to ask: what’s with the sixteenth birthday? In all fairness, this one merely has the bad luck to be the umpteenth novel I have read in which the heroine is in danger because of something that is going to happen on her sixrteenth birthday. A curse, such as the one in the novel Beautiful Creatures, is okay. And I suppose there needed to be a deadline, to move the action along.

However, I think this writer ought to have decided on fantasy or SF and stuck to her choice. Puberty doesn’t turn up on a specific birthday, it just turns up when it feels like it. Unless there’s magic, of course. And wouldn’t immortals be a lot less fertile, to avoid overpopulation? Yes, there are Tolkien’s Elves, such as the Sons of Feanor, but they tend to kill each other a lot, so that’s okay, and Tolkien never pretended it was anything but fantasy anyway. When one of Solange’s uncles, a scientist, explained that it wasn’t quite magic and it wasn’t quite science, I thought: ”Cop-out!” Just as well we never found out the formula for Hypnos, a very convenient spray drug that makes the victim do whatever the caster wants.

That said, I suspect young readers will mostly not notice or worry about it. But the only YA vampire novel I have ever read that has believable science elements was one by Scott Westerfeld in which vampirism is caused by parasites and can be spread by breath and touch. It’s a lot of work to research for science fiction and most people can’t manage it. Alyxandra Harvey, alas, is no exception, at least so far. With a deadline to meet for her next novel she may simply not have time.

I really think the next volume in this series should stick to the fantasy and play down the supposed scientific elements. I just don’t think they work.