Marrone, Amanda: Uninvited
Uninvited
Writer: Amanda Marrone
Genre: Young Adult/Paranormal
Pages: 204

I happened upon this book when the author, amanda_marrone, posted a contest at fangs_fur_fey for an ARC of her debut. I checked out the blurb, found it interesting, and entered the contest. Imagine my surprise when I was one of two winners! :) Free books are always a good thing, and since this one was so short, I decided to give it a whirl as soon as it arrived in my mailbox.

Spoilers ahead.



So we've got your usual teenage angst: Jordan hates her life, has no confidence, lets friends and boys walk all over her, and raids her mother's liquor stash to get wasted. Oh, and her ex-boyfriend killed himself, but he's suddenly hanging outside her window, begging her to let him in.

See, he's now a vampire.

So it's not quite the usual mix of teenage angst. :)

It's interesting to me, ten years removed from the "prime" of my teenage years, to read books that reflect today's teens. For starters, the experiences I hear/read about are nothing like my own when I was in high school, but then again, in high school, I was a very good, very "clean" girl. So even if I was a teenager, I suspect this kind of behavior would still be "news" to me, but that's beside the point. The point is, Marrone does an excellent job at capturing the teenage voice. I believe Jordan as a teen, though she's so pessimistic and anxious that I kind of want to smack her, but hey, what's a teen story without a teen going through a lot of issues?

The good thing about Jordan is that she's got friends and teachers who want to help her. Sure, she can't tell them about her dead ex-boyfriend stalking her window at night, but they provide the impetus for her to start getting a little confidence in herself and taking charge of her life. With a little prompt of hair color (really, hair color can make all the difference when it comes to one's confidence, and I'm not being sarcastic here), Jordan manages to break some bad habits: binge drinking, snorting coke, and letting guys have their way with her at parties even though she's not interested in them. She stands up to her mother and lets her in on the fact that the woman's completely oblivious to what's happening, and she finally calls that guy she's in love with but pushed away thanks to her dead boyfriend showing back up.

And then, of course, there's the dead boyfriend.

I'll be honest: when it comes to paranormal fantasy, I don't have the usual tropes under my belt. I've never read Anne Rice or Laurell K. Hamilton, and I've never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Angel (and because I'm stubborn, I refuse to watch or read any of these, despite how good they may be). When it comes to vampire tropes, I'm aware of the obvious ones--sunlight, bats, garlic, crosses, stakes--but I'm not so versed in them that I can pick up the lesser-known tropes, and if a writer is doing something original with the monsters, I may not catch on.

All that's to say that I think Marrone could've played a little more with her vampire. I think there's a sense that I'm supposed to know everything, that I'm supposed to understand that Michael can't go in Jordan's room unless she invites him in, that just because you're bitten by a vampire doesn't mean you'll either turn or die. These were the two issues that gave me the most trouble, which made me wish we could've seen Jordan do a little more vampire research to understand what Michael was and what was happening to her. It also would've made me a little less anxious about the ending. Jordan and her friend Lisa both get bitten, but I know Jordan wasn't turned, and I don't think Lisa was either (Michael makes a remark that he wasn't done with her yet, but that she didn't have much left anyway), but there was still a lack of closure in that regard. Granted, I wouldn't have expected Jordan to find some research tidbit explaining that one doesn't turn into a vampire until exactly 99.5498% of one's blood has been depleted by a bite, but you know. :) A little clarification wouldn't have hurt.

And none of this takes away from the book, which at its heart is a story about a girl taking charge of her own life and making it something that matters instead of hiding away. Marrone handles this remarkably well, and she really set Jordan up for WANTING to let Michael in, even though she intellectually knew better. It made the conflict more real and made Jordan's resolution to stop him even more satisfying. And I love that she doesn't get out of the fight unscathed. Even though she's removing the tree that's the basic symbol of Michael's torment of her, she's always going to have that limp. Yet, while the limp will always be a reminder of what happened and what COULD have happened, Jordan now has the tools to get past that, and those tools came from herself and from the people who love her most.



The book's a good one, and it's a fast read. Oh, I had a few nitpicks--I would've liked a little more setting towards the beginning, and there's an opening sentence about the noise Jordan's hair makes across the pillow being so loud she grimaces (hair makes noise on a pillow? Really? Maybe my hair's too fine to do such a thing...)--but there's nothing in the tale to pull one out of the story, and Marrone's work with her protagonist is really good. She sounds like a real teen, and she makes real decisions too, which is what made this book so satisfying. :)

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