Have I joined the league of...

...Evil Librarians? Just finished this awesome Jr/Teen 'fantasy' book called "Alcatraz versus the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson. It was a riot with the mixture of story and lecture to the reader. It's really hard to explain but one part talks about how information can either free or control a country (or in this case a kingdom). As information specialists, Librarians have been able to deceive and control the Hushlands and it is up to the Smedry family to defeat the Librarians and let the truth be known. Each Smedry has a unique and valuable talent and are named after Prisons, or as they tell it the Librarians name prisons after the Smedrys. Alcatraz has the talent to break things, his Grandfather, Leavenworth, has the talent of always arriving late, his cousin, Sing, has the talent of tripping, and his other cousin, Quentin has the talent of speaking gibberish. Throw in a knight named Bastille and you have a group of heroes ready to free us from the control of the Evil Librarians.
I would recommend this one to all you families out there who are looking for a great read aloud with you 5-8th grade boys but girls would love it too. Just don't believe everything you read about librarians. After all I will let you read the book!

They vant to suck your blood...

...but they end up making you laugh. I don't know how long the paranormal romance fad is going to last but after 5+ years it is still going strong. I don't really enjoy the blood and guts of vampire novels but the vamp romances I read are usually more funny than bloody.
It intrigues me the way different author's tackle the origin and need to feed of vampires. Lyndsay Sands creates her vamps as the natives of Atlantis, where technology was so advanced that they created microbots that are injected into the bloodstream and repair damage to the body. Well they may have been advanced in technology but evidently they didn't know biology. The body is always dying and weakening so their little bots were constantly working to repair the body and keep it in peak condition. Since they use blood to repair the body they then needed to replace the blood or those little bots would end up killing the body they were trying to preserve. Sound confusing? Sands definitely describes it better and one of my favorites by her is "The Accidental Vampire".
Other author's I enjoy don't have as unique origin stories but the almost all feed from blood banks or, as Kerrilyn Sparks Vamps do, synthetic blood. I just read a new author who is starting a Vamp series about a childrens librarian turned Vamp after being shot by a drunk hunter. Her series starts with "Nice Girls Don't Have Fangs", and reminds me of MaryJanice Davidson's "Undead..." series. Very humorous but doesn't tell the story in one book.
Okay that's enough of for the undead right now, I'm heading back to Iris Johansen and some breathtaking suspense!