Insatiable

Cabot, Meg.   Insatiable.   New York:  Morrow, 2010.

Audience:  High School, 16+

Genre:  Young Adult Fiction, Horror, Romance

Topics of Focus:  Vampires, Prognostication

Red Flags:   Sexuality, Violence

Call me crazy, but I love good vampire stories.   I also enjoy a little romance here and there.   So, combine the two in a more mature young-adult novel, and I’m going to try it out.   The highly popular writer with the teen girl set, Meg Cabot, did not disappoint me.   Insatiable is not your common Twilight drivel.   It’s a smart, funny, possibilities-of-history-base-but-with-mythology-blended-in type of vampire story with a strong female protagonist.     

Cabot’s main character, Meena Harper (yes, it sounds like Stoker’s main female lead), is a script writer for the highly-popular soap opera, Insatiable.   She has the usual challenges to overcome--affording her NYC lifestyle, work politics, boyfriend troubles, quirky neighbors, and a useless brother who shares her apartment.   Meena also is a prognosticator; she can see people’s futures, or at least their future death.   While out walking her dog, who has a personality all his own, she runs into a tall, dark handsome stranger who suddenly pushes her to the sidewalk, covering her from a colony of attacking bats.   Both rise, supposedly unharmed, part ways, and that seems to be the end of it.   A couple of days later, Meena’s neighbors, an older couple straight out of Rosemary’s Baby, invite her to a dinner party.   Once again she comes face to face with the same stranger in the form of Lucien Antonescue, a Romanian history professor from the University of Bucharest.  Instant sexual sparks fly between the two and Meena becomes embroiled in a series of intrigues where her clairvoyant gift is discovered and sought after by a darker side of Lucien’s world.   The reader and Meena soon learn that Lucien is no other than the son of Vlad Tepes, the infamous and torturous 15^th century Romanian ruler of vampire lore.    Unlike his father, Lucien has a heart of gold and only wants peace (and he can cook!).  Lucien, like his half-brother Dimitri, is a real vampire, the prince of the vampires actually.   Sibling rivalry, mysterious murders of young women, warring factions of underworld beings, a rather sexy special-ops character from the Vatican, and an array of interesting minor characters give Cabot’s story substance and a strong cadence.   The reader flies through the story toward a resolution that makes one thirst for more.  

Cabot does manipulate to a fault some elements of vampire mythology to situate them into a modernized setting, vampires crossing a threshold and mind-erasure or glamoring, for instance.   Whatever its faults, this tale will appeal to the numerous vampire romance readers out there.   Yet, it will also appeal to general readers, male and female.   And while it is a rather long text, there is enough history, gore, mystery, fantasy, and suspense to carry even a reluctant reader through to the end and into its sequel, Overbite.

Annotation by Denise Aulik