What makes for a bad day? It all depends on who you are. If you’re a teenage girl, maybe having ultra-conservative parents who never let you do anything might do it. Or maybe having your almost boyfriend make a drunken fool of himself. Then, there’s the rumor that the same almost boyfriend cheated with your best friend, that’s a bad one too, almost as bad as a killer geometry test. Then there is the granddaddy of them all, being marked as a vampyre—forced to turn into a blood-sucking freak or die a horrible death. All in all, really sucky day for almost any teenage girl—definitely for Zoey Montgomery, heroine of Marked, which is P.C. & Kristin Cast’s first book in the House of the Night series.

Ever been the new kid at school? You know everyone is looking at you, talking about you, speculating on everything from your clothes to your face. They all are trying to figure out where you fit in, while you’re trying to do the same. It sucks to be the new kid, especially when the school is one for vampyres and you don’t have a clue how to be one. Enter, Zoey Montgomery, our heroine of Betrayed, Book 2 in the House of Night series by P.C. and Kristin Cast.

As the new kid, Zoey does the unthinkable and knocks the current reigning leader of the Dark Daughters, Aphrodite, out of place. Can anyone say enemy for life? Or would that be unlife? No matter, Zoey knows she has to watch her step because good ol’ Ap will be gunning for her. That’s her plan: to watch her step, be the model student, model leader, the whole bit -- except there are some unexpected problems.

Going back to the world of Patricia Briggs and the Tri-Cities in Washington State, Blood Bound gives us another taste of life more than ordinary. Sometimes, it's downright scary.

Mercedes 'Mercy' Thompson, coyote walker and VW mechanic, tries to stay out of trouble. Really, she does.

But when you work on the cars of vampires and your next door neighbor is the alpha of the local werewolf pack, Adam Hauptman, your housemate is also male werewolf Sam McCormick, doctor and strong dominate… and both men would like nothing more than to be able to call you theirs, staying out of trouble is a lot like trying to stay dry while swimming.

As the urban fantasy/paranormal genre becomes more popular, the more all the books seem to be more of the same. I suppose this is true of all genres of writing. And while I love the urban fantasy/paranormal genre (lord do I remember people going “what you are reading a vampire romance!!! Ugh how could you!) I want something different, something with an edge of…”I am so bad but oh so good” to them. And you get that with Richelle Mead’s Georgina Kincaid in Succubus on Top.

I've been spending a lot of time in the Regency period and thought I'd try a taste of something new and different. Happy Hour of the Damned certainly fits that description. Thanks to Mark Henry I will never walk into a Starbucks alone again.

Once I managed to pry my copy out of my significant other's hands (yes, he got to it first and would not put it down) I found Happy Hour of the Damned to be a quick witty read that reminded me of a cross between Bridget Jones and The Devil Wears Prada.

 
We've all heard of the werewolf. And the vampire. And the fairies (or faeries, depending on how you want to cut it). But there are hundreds of other beings out there beneath the surface we've just scratched. One of those creatures is the skinwalker, and it comes to life in Patricia Briggs' Moon Called.

Mercedes Thompson doesn't have what we'd call a 'normal' life. For starters, she's the only VW mechanic she's ever heard of with a name like Mercedes. And she's a skinwalker: a being that can literally go from human to coyote in the blink of an eye. It's the only thing she got from her Native American father.