A review by wardenred
How To Bite Your Neighbor & Win A Wager by D.N. Bryn

emotional mysterious medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

I wager my life that you’re going to keep yours.

I feel like the book has never quite come together for me. There are many aspects of it that I liked. Wes and Vincent had a lot of cute moments together. There was some interesting discussion about consent and monstrosity. I really liked the progression of Wes’s feelings, how he started his friendship with Vincent so that he could get his hands on a vampire to bring to the evil pharmaceutical company that probably killed his mom, then developed genuine affection for this specific vampire, but oops, the things with the company were already in motion and it wasn’t possible to just backtrack. There was some really cool tension in the second half of the book over it all, and I liked those tense moments just as much as I enjoyed the various slice-of-life-ish scenes about bonding over videogames and too spicy noodles. Speaking of games, I really liked the sheer nerdiness of the characters. And then there was Wes’s awesome long-distance friendship with Kendall: the strings of messages between them were often great additions to the story, and honestly, everyone needs a friend who will call you out on your shit and push you to make better choices.

So, yeah, a lot of good stuff, but I had so many questions about the worldbuilding around it that it was actually distracting. On one hand, the book is all about the co-existence between vampires and humans, but on the other hand, the vampires’ overall position in the society is soooo unclear. It just keeps boiling down to, “They are very different and keep getting oppressed for it,“ but like, is it a universal situation and does oppression always take the same forms? What about the vampire communities, where are they, how do they function? What is the exact legal status of vampires, are there any regulations around turning people into vampires, what are the laws and regulations about hunting/donor blood? Seems like everyone knows vampires are out there, mostly dislikes them, and also just calmly accepts that one of them might break into anyone’s house in the middle of the night and give you anemia? It all feels like they’ve just recently emerged from the shadows and the world is still adapting, except the book explicitly states it’s been centuries. 

Likewise, the whole situation with Wes’s mom’s disappearance and the plot with the pharm company could use some fleshing out. Especially the company thing. I might look up the reviews for book 2 and see if other readers feel like it was expanded on and resolved more later, then decide based on that if I’m continuing with the series.
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