Bentonville Public Library

Brittany's Book-A-Week

Posted by Brittany on 28 January 2012 | 0 Comments

The book I read this week was The Radleys by Matt Haig, about a family of abstainers, vampires who are living a weakened half-life because they have decided not to drink human blood. Peter and Helen Radley haven’t always been abstainers, but they have raised their teenage children Rowan and Clara to know nothing about their true identity. This family’s relatively normal, boring British world is turned upside down after Clara violently and unexpectedly unleashes her true nature. The consequences of this act have enormous implications for not only Clara, but for her entire family, when repressed temptations and family secrets come to light. This isn’t normally a book I would pick up and decide to read on a whim. I’m usually drawn to light-hearted books – Princess of Glass, for instance. But this book had one thing that drew me to it: the language and writing promised to be very, very beautiful. Haig delivered in every way. Matt Haig has a talent for weaving words together that makes me crave more. The images he is able to invoke and the feelings he is able to capture are absolutely breathtaking. Put that together with a plot that starts out slow but builds up to be captivatingly intense and you have an altogether enjoyable book. The book also raises some startling questions about morality, temptation, marriage, and love. Haig’s view on vampirism, a completely overdone theme in today’s young adult literature, is surprisingly fresh and easy to imagine is real and his characters are complex and relatable. In this version of reality, great artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Lord Byron, and Miles Davis were vampires, a theme slightly overdone but presented in a less trite way. I do have a couple warnings before I start recommending this book to everyone. One, the language is not polite. At all. Be prepared for a lot of swear words, especially in the dialogue. On that note, this book is very adult. Three of the main narrators are adults, and as such it presents an adult viewpoint of the world as contrasted to the teenage viewpoint of the world. There are some very short graphic sex scenes, and some graphically violent scenes. I would recommend this book to more mature teens who are looking for older books to read, and definitely to adults looking for an interesting take on the vampire craze.