The Radleys review

[alobear]

Many thanks to lareinemisere and corone for giving me The Radleys by Matt Haig for my birthday.  The fact that I read it in 24 hours should speak for itself (even if that 24 hours did involve a business trip to Birmingham).  It's basically a family drama with the twist that the family are vampires attempting to blend into normal suburban life in Yorkshire.  It's not giving away to much to say that, since that becomes obvious within the first few pages.  In fact, the entire book is very predictable, but not in a bad way, as I enjoyed seeing exactly how the story unfolded into the plotlines I had foreseen without suffering the anxiety of wondering what was going to happen next.  It did have a bit of a Twilight moment towards the end, but the contempt of one of the other characters mitigated the problem nicely, and overall the conclusion was reasonably satisfying.  It's a light, entertaining read, which adds little to the vampire canon but never claims to be either pretentious or startlingly original.

Comments

[lareinemisere.livejournal.com]

Hurrah! Guardian Review section FTW (again!)

[alobear.livejournal.com]

My favourite line was when the parents were listing famous vampires through the ages:

"Pretty much all the Romantics, except Wordsworth."

Hee, hee!