Kate Cary, Bloodline (Razorbill, 2005)
Shanna Swendson, Once Upon Stilettos (Ballantine, 2006)
It's interesting to see the directions taken by authors whose books come recommended for fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I've recently encountered two such books, one of which is significantly darker than the other.
With Bloodline, a horror novel aimed at the young adult market, Kate Cary sets a very ambitious goal for herself: this book is crafted as a direct sequel to one of the iconic horror novels of all time, Bram Stoker's Dracula. She falls well short of equaling that work's classic status, but she does craft an entertaining read that keeps the pages turning quickly as the plot unfolds.
The timeframe here is 1916, during the darkest days of World War One, before the entrance of the Americans into the war and when seemingly all of Europe had become a land of bloody fields criss-crossed by trenches and barbed wire. One British soldier, Lieutenant John Shaw, is returned to a hospital in England after he is wounded, where he is placed in the care of a sympathetic nurse named Mary Seward. Mary takes up the journal that Shaw wrote while in the trenches in France, and in those pages she reads of the horrors Shaw faced there, horrors not limited exclusively to war, some of which seem to be connected with Shaw's commanding officer, Captain Quincey Harker.
Cary constructs her novel following Bram Stoker's template, using as did the earlier work the journals and letters of the characters to advance her narrative. The shifting viewpoints are mostly effective, and through them Cary is able to inject a good amount of dramatic irony into her tale, as the characters pursue actions that we know from the other journals to be faulty. The book has a very nice sense of foreboding running through it, especially once the pace picks up about a quarter of the way in. Particularly effective is the way in which Lt. Shaw's reaction to being reminded of the things he saw in the war are handled; it's clear that he is suffering from post-traumatic stress, and given the things that Captain Harker has done on his sorties alone into the region between the trenches, it's no wonder.
The book leaves an opening for a forthcoming sequel.
A lighter touch is found in Once Upon Stilettos, by Shanna Swendson. Although the cover blurb makes mention of Buffy, I was more reminded in ways of the Harry Potter universe (possibly because I never got into Buffy and only watched a handful of episodes of that series). Here, as in the Potterverse, we have magical people who work in and around non-magical folk, and who must exercise care in using their magical powers in the presence of non-magical folk. But where the Potter books take place in and around the quasi-medieval castle that is Hogwarts, Swendson has set Once Upon Stilettos squarely in the middle of New York City. This book is also a sequel, this time to Swendson's own Enchanted, Inc. I have not read the earlier work, but Once Upon Stilettos does not seem to suffer for not having read its "parent" work.
Our heroine, Katie Chandler, works for a Manahttan company called Magic, Spells, and Illusions Inc., even though she is apparently the equivalent of a "muggle," with no magical powers of her own (and a helpful immunity to magic as well). As the book opens, Katie is concerned with her dating life -- it seems she has quite the crush on an attractive wizard in her company named Owen -- but soon she is co-opted by her company's CEO, Merlin (of Camelot fame), to do some sleuthing after some kind of intra-office espionage is found to have taken place. It quickly becomes clear that Katie has enemies of her own, and life for her becomes very difficult indeed, especially as her magical immunity apparently begins to wane at a very bad time.
Where the tone of Bloodline was largely dark and occasionally ponderous, the tone of Once Upon Stilettos is always light and breezy. At many points, the plot seems to meander a bit, and the feel is generally airy. Between the two books, Bloodline was more to my tastes; I generally found Once Upon Stilettos to be a mildly entertaining, if uninspiring, read.
