You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.59 AVERAGE
3.59 AVERAGE
like Twilight without the innocense and self-less purity of the main characters. It has a more real less romantic storyline and a twisted but somewhat predictable ending. A good read
This was a re-read of a book that was a favorite of mine in middle school/high school. You never know if childhood favorites will hold up to an adult lens. There were definitely some 90s things that stuck out, things that wouldn't be as acceptable today, and I'm sure there's a not insignificant amount of nostalgia coloring my opinion, but it was a still a good read for me.
I haven't read this since high school, but I can still remember this is the worst book I have ever read. If I could rate it no stars I would. Don't ever plan on picking this up to even refresh my memory.
I first read this because the movie had just came out in theaters. A friend of mine happened to see the movie, and said they loved it. I was naive back then taking recommendations like candy from a stranger. So the next time my family went out to the mall, I went into ye ol' Borders and bought the book!
The whole thing was questionable. Then there was the (questionable) ending. My impression final impression was that a deadline had to be met, and what we got was whatever was put onto the page. I know not every book has to end the way you want, but Jesus!
(I also watched the movie a few years later with this in mind. They certainly changed the ending, but it isn't that much better.)
I first read this because the movie had just came out in theaters. A friend of mine happened to see the movie, and said they loved it. I was naive back then taking recommendations like candy from a stranger. So the next time my family went out to the mall, I went into ye ol' Borders and bought the book!
The whole thing was questionable. Then there was the (questionable) ending. My impression final impression was that a deadline had to be met, and what we got was whatever was put onto the page. I know not every book has to end the way you want, but Jesus!
(I also watched the movie a few years later with this in mind. They certainly changed the ending, but it isn't that much better.)
I fear that a lot of what I might say about this book will brand me as an old lady who is out of touch with today's youth. So be it.
There were messages in this book that I found to be the antithesis of what we should be teaching young women. It's okay to act like a psycho and terrorize people to get what you want. Women should fight over men, because a woman without a man is sad and useless. By all means, dress in age-inappropriate, revealing clothes to get attention. Flirt with your boyfriend's father, that's cool too. Worst of all, the over-riding message: that everything will be okay if the 'right' boy likes you.
I'd started this book hopeful that it was (yet another) YA novel about a girl who is different finding her place in society and being happy. In the abstract, perhaps that is the outcome, but the means by which she achieved her happiness left me cold.
There were messages in this book that I found to be the antithesis of what we should be teaching young women. It's okay to act like a psycho and terrorize people to get what you want. Women should fight over men, because a woman without a man is sad and useless. By all means, dress in age-inappropriate, revealing clothes to get attention. Flirt with your boyfriend's father, that's cool too. Worst of all, the over-riding message: that everything will be okay if the 'right' boy likes you.
I'd started this book hopeful that it was (yet another) YA novel about a girl who is different finding her place in society and being happy. In the abstract, perhaps that is the outcome, but the means by which she achieved her happiness left me cold.
2024 reread: Having read The Vampire Diaries in the interim since my last reread reframes this for me, because I think the phenomenon of a female teen lead who is a wish-fulfillment/power fantasy à la Vivian or Elena was just A Thing in the 90s that has since been replaced (in my spotty understanding of YA, let's put that caveat over this whole thing) by the relatable everygirl lead à la Bella in Twilight in the 2000s. So Vivian is less special than I thought, although it's still a delightful template, these infuriating, arrogant teen girls, aspirational but still caught up in adolescent insecurities. But for all that boldness, there's something conservative in her arc: Vivian is punished for stepping out of her social role and experimenting sexually; her happy ending is to concede to social pressures and sexual advances. That push and pull is interesting but messy as hell in a book which is already weirdly paced and inconsistently written.
2020 reread: I like this more than the last time I reread it, and the only real difference is that I'm less dead-set on hating everything I associate with my adolescence. It's still trash, but its position in the paranormal romance genre is interesting--namely that it's not "my monster boyfriend" but "me, the monster, getting a boyfriend." The positioning of the protagonist, that she begins as powerful, beautiful, and assured but has to fight to preserve that self-image when her social role is challenged, engages but inverts adolescent female feelings; it's refreshing. It's still flawed, particularly the dated, problematic framing of the romantic rivals, but also the rocky balance of pack dynamics and teenage drama. But the plot stretches the humid length of summer and the writing is, honestly, a delight: "Vivian stretched and pawed at the ground, she sniffed the glorious air. She felt as if her tail could sweep the stars from the sky."
2007 review: Vivian is a werewolf: young, attractive, just come of age, and proud to be a wolf. However, after the death of her father, her pack has been displaced and is in turmoil, making her feel estranged from the other wolves. When she meets a human boy named Aiden, romance sparks between them. He is a welcome change from the turmoil of her wolf life, but love between a human and a werewolf is forbidden and Vivian worries that Aiden will not be able to accept her completely. Blood and Chocolate is a very different coming of age story, in which Vivian must learn to completely accept herself as a wolf and learn the differences between the werewolf and the human. The plot is interesting, but the characters are exaggerated and idealized and the writing lacks skill, although improves during the course of the book. This is a text I would have preferred to keep on remembering fondly from my childhood; it does not make a very good reread for an adult audience. Ambivalently recommended.
There are some books from your childhood that you come back to, reread, and discover that they are as good as you remember or even better. There are other books from your childhood that turn out to be something of a disappointment, and this book is of that later category. Blood and Chocolate has a wonderful premise, but complications such as characterization and writing style drag the book down. The first half is bad, almost laughably so. The second half improves as characters become more complex and the writing matures, but all in all this is a book best left fondly remembered rather than reread.
For the first part of the text, the characters are cliché to a great degree; only with complications in the plot do they become more complex themselves. Vivian is devastatingly attractive with exceptionally long legs. She wears skin-tight dresses that "sheath" her form. She writes her phone number on Aiden’s palm. Until the character falls into love and then begins to doubt her love, she is exceptionally limited, idealized, cliché, and laughably so for all qualities. The writing style also begins as limited and as cliché, rich with verbs like “sheath,” cliff-hangers, thoughts in italics, and a brash neo-Gothic air. However, I suspect that the book was written linearly, because by the end the writing style has much matured and improved.
The improvement in both character and writing style makes the end of the book better, even satisfying, but it also makes the book as a whole feel disjointed. In fact, the end of the book is quite good, both in terms of the plot itself and Vivian’s changes and challenges, and in terms of style and technique. On this account, I do somewhat recommend the book, as by the end it feels like a worthwhile read. However, the better the end of the book gets, the worse the beginning feels in comparison, making me wish that Klause and her editor had spent more time bring the whole of the book to a universal high standard. In the end, I recommend this text only ambivalently: it’s not a bad one to read as young adult and the ending does help justify the time spend reading, but technically it is an inconsistent, sub par text. Read it if you want, or don’t, but you may not want to come back to it if you had fond memories of it from your childhood.
2020 reread: I like this more than the last time I reread it, and the only real difference is that I'm less dead-set on hating everything I associate with my adolescence. It's still trash, but its position in the paranormal romance genre is interesting--namely that it's not "my monster boyfriend" but "me, the monster, getting a boyfriend." The positioning of the protagonist, that she begins as powerful, beautiful, and assured but has to fight to preserve that self-image when her social role is challenged, engages but inverts adolescent female feelings; it's refreshing. It's still flawed, particularly the dated, problematic framing of the romantic rivals, but also the rocky balance of pack dynamics and teenage drama. But the plot stretches the humid length of summer and the writing is, honestly, a delight: "Vivian stretched and pawed at the ground, she sniffed the glorious air. She felt as if her tail could sweep the stars from the sky."
2007 review: Vivian is a werewolf: young, attractive, just come of age, and proud to be a wolf. However, after the death of her father, her pack has been displaced and is in turmoil, making her feel estranged from the other wolves. When she meets a human boy named Aiden, romance sparks between them. He is a welcome change from the turmoil of her wolf life, but love between a human and a werewolf is forbidden and Vivian worries that Aiden will not be able to accept her completely. Blood and Chocolate is a very different coming of age story, in which Vivian must learn to completely accept herself as a wolf and learn the differences between the werewolf and the human. The plot is interesting, but the characters are exaggerated and idealized and the writing lacks skill, although improves during the course of the book. This is a text I would have preferred to keep on remembering fondly from my childhood; it does not make a very good reread for an adult audience. Ambivalently recommended.
There are some books from your childhood that you come back to, reread, and discover that they are as good as you remember or even better. There are other books from your childhood that turn out to be something of a disappointment, and this book is of that later category. Blood and Chocolate has a wonderful premise, but complications such as characterization and writing style drag the book down. The first half is bad, almost laughably so. The second half improves as characters become more complex and the writing matures, but all in all this is a book best left fondly remembered rather than reread.
For the first part of the text, the characters are cliché to a great degree; only with complications in the plot do they become more complex themselves. Vivian is devastatingly attractive with exceptionally long legs. She wears skin-tight dresses that "sheath" her form. She writes her phone number on Aiden’s palm. Until the character falls into love and then begins to doubt her love, she is exceptionally limited, idealized, cliché, and laughably so for all qualities. The writing style also begins as limited and as cliché, rich with verbs like “sheath,” cliff-hangers, thoughts in italics, and a brash neo-Gothic air. However, I suspect that the book was written linearly, because by the end the writing style has much matured and improved.
The improvement in both character and writing style makes the end of the book better, even satisfying, but it also makes the book as a whole feel disjointed. In fact, the end of the book is quite good, both in terms of the plot itself and Vivian’s changes and challenges, and in terms of style and technique. On this account, I do somewhat recommend the book, as by the end it feels like a worthwhile read. However, the better the end of the book gets, the worse the beginning feels in comparison, making me wish that Klause and her editor had spent more time bring the whole of the book to a universal high standard. In the end, I recommend this text only ambivalently: it’s not a bad one to read as young adult and the ending does help justify the time spend reading, but technically it is an inconsistent, sub par text. Read it if you want, or don’t, but you may not want to come back to it if you had fond memories of it from your childhood.
adventurous
dark
medium-paced
This was a really good read. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. In fact, I couldn't put it down and read it in one sitting. Granted, it is written for the teen/tweens, but it was still a fairly good portrayal of a "real" teen. At first, I was sort of put off by all the sex talk, but then when I thought about it, that's what we all think about at that age. I thought the story was really interesting and it was really believable. Some people may not like the ending, but I really did. For the first time in a while, I have found a book that I have enjoyed from start to finish and even liked the end. This book is a must read for those who enjoy young adult books or those who like a good werewolf story.
This book baffled me. Even in 1997 was it cool to have a perfectly beautiful, blond, big-boobied, long-legged girl who looks down on goth chicks as your protagonist? Was it OK to have a girl character totally un-interested in school, whose only personality traits were her ever-present desire to attain sexual attention from boys and her fierce competition with other women for that sexual attention, even her own mother? I guess I was too busy listening to the Indigo Girls, dressing up like Tank Girl, and cutting the seams of my jeans to insert cloth panels so they became ridiculously large to notice, but I do vaguely remember snotty girls like Vivian who thought they were entitled to the world because they were lovely to look at. I guess this book was written for them, but I'm not sure if they were really into werewolves?
I found Vivian an uncompelling main character and the plot was your standard girl-novel "which boy will the girl pick, thus determining her personality?" Boo. I kind of get what the author was trying to do-- the protagonist was an animal, after all, kind of, and thus her way of viewing the world was more embodied-- but I don't necessarily think it was successful, nor do I think it was particularly well-written. Vivian was shallow and icky and her pack comes across as nothing but a bunch of trashy, dysfunctional, terrible people: the males are constantly dick-swinging, the females are constantly bickering over which of the sexy dudes they can bang to get power for their own. The whole werewolf-change as a metaphor for masturbation thing was the only interesting part, but if I'm going to waste my time with a weird "werewolfism as metaphor for female sexuality" text I'll just re-watch Ginger Snaps.
I dunno. I know everyone loves this book. I really feel like I'm missing something.
I found Vivian an uncompelling main character and the plot was your standard girl-novel "which boy will the girl pick, thus determining her personality?" Boo. I kind of get what the author was trying to do-- the protagonist was an animal, after all, kind of, and thus her way of viewing the world was more embodied-- but I don't necessarily think it was successful, nor do I think it was particularly well-written. Vivian was shallow and icky and her pack comes across as nothing but a bunch of trashy, dysfunctional, terrible people: the males are constantly dick-swinging, the females are constantly bickering over which of the sexy dudes they can bang to get power for their own. The whole werewolf-change as a metaphor for masturbation thing was the only interesting part, but if I'm going to waste my time with a weird "werewolfism as metaphor for female sexuality" text I'll just re-watch Ginger Snaps.
I dunno. I know everyone loves this book. I really feel like I'm missing something.