Thursday, February 9, 2017

Book 11: Samantha Watkins: Chronicles of an Extraordinary Ordinary Life

Samantha Watkins: Chronicles of an Extraordinary Ordinary Life by Venem follows a year in the life of Samantha Watkins, who starts out as a quiet, friendless librarian working in her old high school.  One night as she walks home, she is not paying attention and ends up in a bad part of town in the middle of a fight between three vampires.  Humans that know about vampires have two choices: work for a vampire or die.  Phoenix offers her a position as his assistant because he hates writing reports.  Since she really has no choice, she accepts his offer and begins training.  Phoenix is trying to determine who is responsible for the abundance of human disappearances in the area, which are threatening the exposure of the vampire community, so for Sam there is no real warm up or chance for mistakes if she wants to survive.  If they do not find the culprits before the Elders intervene then this just may be the last job for both of them.

Overall I have mixed feelings about the book.  Samantha's character seemed very inconsistent to me going from helpless to ridiculously furious to cool and competent to whiny and needy. Sometimes I wanted to cheer her on and other times I wanted to strangle her.  Phoenix's character likewise seemed to swing back and forth more than I would expect from a 500 year old vampire.  The mystery part of the plot was well written, but there were also inconsistencies.  For example, why would she get lost on a walk in such a familiar area?  The ending of the book is also extremely frustrating.  I despise cliffhangers, and this one was really unnecessary.  The book could have stopped a few pages earlier and had a nice ending with enough open threads that I would have been curious about the second book.  The last few pages would have been fine as opener for book 2.  I also am annoyed that the remainder of the books remain untranslated despite the number of requests that I see on the Amazon site for English translations.  Overall, I would say three and a half stars.

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