Nice Girls Don't Have Fangs
Grade : B

Fans of humorous vampire romances, please make welcome Molly Harper whose debut Nice Girls Don’t Have Fangs is the first in a series about Jane Jameson, a former librarian, now a vampire in a small Kentucky town. <!-- var browName = navigator.appName; var SiteID = 1; var ZoneID = 4; var browDateTime = (new Date()).getTime(); if (browName=='Netscape') { document.write(''); document.write(''); } if (browName!='Netscape') { document.write(''); document.write(''); } // -->

Jane Jameson likes her life in Half-Moon Hollow, Kentucky. She lives in a big historically prominent house called River Oaks, willed to her by her great-aunt Jettie who understood her in a way her mother never did. Jane is a popular librarian and loves her job, but, alas, her supervisor Mrs. Stubblefield does not like her and arranges for her to be let go - ostensibly because of budget cuts (actually Mrs. Stubblefield wants her incompetent daughter to have the job). To add insult to injury, Jane gets no severance pay, only a gift certificate to the local bar.

I’d say getting fired is a good excuse to drown your troubles, especially when it won’t cost you anything and Jane proceeds to drink up the entire certificate. There’s a handsome man named Gabriel at the bar who sits by her and offers a sympathetic ear. He stays till the end while Jane drinks coffee and sobers up, then escorts her to her car. Since Jane hasn’t had the best of luck with men, she doesn’t expect to see Gabriel again and set off for home. When her old car (Big Bertha) stops while she’s still out in the country, Jane gets out to see what’s happening and a drunken good ol’ boy mistakes her for a deer and shoots her.

But Gabriel is right there and saves Jane’s life by turning her into a vampire. In the society depicted in this book, vampires are a fairly common sight, even in Half-Moon Hollow. The vampire community has been out and about since 2000, and even has products especially formulated for them, like SPF 500 sunscreen. When Jane wakes up at home, her reaction to her new state of being is to leap to the ceiling and cling there, but after talking to Gabriel, she decides that being a vampire beats being dead and begins to plan her new unlife.

Nice Girls Don’t Have Fangs introduces a large cast of characters who will no doubt show up in future books. There’s Jane’s best friend Zeb who has fallen in love with Jolene, a werewolf. There’s Richard (Dick) Cheney, a local vampire who is kind of a player, but proves to be a pretty nice guy and likes Jane (Gabriel is jealous). Jane is accused of killing one of the local white trash vampires (a big no-no), falls out of favor with the local vampire council, and generally has a ton of problems dumped on her just when she is trying to figure our her new life (and her relationship with Gabriel).

I had a very, very good time reading this book. I like humorous vampire stories if the main character is a likeable one, and I loved Jane. The book is told in first person, and Jane is just the kind of woman I’d like to call a friend. She isn’t prone to angst, she doesn’t obsess over her looks, she loves books, has a mind full of trivia and is good to animals. She does her best with her family, who with the exception of her father are all jerks (I hope that Jane’s sister Jenny gets hers in a future book). Heck, I even liked the ghost of Aunt Jettie and I normally don’t like ghosts at all.

If you are a fan of humorous vampire stories, please pick up Nice Girls Don’t Have Fangs. Jane is such a great character, and there are so many funny lines and scenes that I dog eared my copy just to go back and re-read them. This was a fun book all around and right now it’s my choice for my favorite humorous romance for this year.

Reviewed by Ellen Micheletti
Grade : B
Book Type: Vampire Romance

Sensuality: Warm

Review Date : March 23, 2009

Publication Date: 2009/04

Review Tags: Vampires

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Ellen Micheletti

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