Vampire Academy Series

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I, like the rest of the reading world, have been reading YA (young adult) novels like crazy recently. Twilight started it, The Hunger Games stoked it, and the huge number of YA series, especially those with supernatural or apocalyptic milieux, has fueled it ever since.

A lot of these series are just okay, but the one that has stood out the most for me has been the Vampire Academy series. The protagonist is a vampire guardian named Rose, a teenage Nikita who curses, beats up rivals, and lusts after her trainer. Although I sometimes react against girl heroines who are made tough, as if a girl has to be a superhero in order to be feminist, I really do like Rose. I'm on the second novel now, Frostbite, and it's just as good as the first.

It's interesting to think about what makes one series work and another not. Most of the series are very similar, made up of the same cohort of elements: danger, supernatural characters, frustrated love, conflict between duty and desire, the bad boy, the safe boy. But some leave me cold and some engage me. Everyone knows that Stephenie Meyer is the worst stylist of the bunch. But it's equally obvious that she's the best novelist of the bunch too. No other YA novel, and few novels of any kind, have gripped readers the way her novels do. If I were a vampire and had all the time in the world, I'd try to identify the secret structure of good storytelling. (Yes, sad to say, this is actually what I would do with eternity. At least after the first century or so.)

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