Life among the bohemians

I'm sure most of you have been following the whole open-source boob kerfuffle, but you may not have seen possibly the most AWESOME thing to come out of it - this Harriet Vane fic encapsulating it all brilliantly. Harriet and her bohemian friends are love.

Gleason, Colleen: The Gardella Vampire Chronicles

I’d seen the Colleen Gleason Gardella Vampire Chronicles books around on my flist. They seemed interesting, and anything that claims to blend Regency and Buffy seemed to be a pretty good bet for something that I’d be interested in, so I bought the first two as part of my recent Amazon splurge. I don’t think I ever had really high hopes for them, but I figured they’d be fun, quick reads that would be a nice jolt of fluffy entertainment, even if they weren’t anything more than that.

Victoria is a young noblewoman who is the newest inheritor of a family tradition – the finding and slaying of vampires. In the first book, The Rest Falls Away, she begins her journey as a Venator (slayer) and struggles to live a life of relative normalcy despite her duties, which require her to spend more time at parties killing vampires in the garden than flirting with eligible young men. The second book, Rises the Night, moves the action from London to Italy and continues her slaying adventures. Two men, Max (a fellow Venator who is by turns sullen, surly, and broody) and Sebastian (a shady but very hot Frenchman) move in and out of her adventures, providing the requisite sexual escapades.

Unfortunately, although they had moments of zing, the books were too badly written for me to get into. The Regency setting is a mere overlay, never managing to be more than a very roughly sketched backdrop which allows for carriages, descriptions of pretty dresses, and a ladies maid who knows how to include stakes in a fetching updo. The writing tends towards the heavy-handed and the clunky.

My biggest issue was the huge conflict, particularly in the second book, with the description of Victoria as a confident, strong woman due to inherit the leadership of the Venators, with the overwhelming desire of everyone around her to keep her as clueless as possible and to assume that she needs to be told what to do (like a good girl). I found it vastly frustrating to the point of book-tossing, that Victoria was expected to toddle away like a good girl and stay out of things, but at the same time was expected to take up the leadership of the entire organization eventually, and of course do a brilliant job with it. The first book made me roll my eyes once or twice, the second book made me snarl and consider heaving it out the nearest window.