Taste by Kate Evangelista
I am back from Hiatus Hawaii with several exciting new reviews, all full of snarky sarcasm and wit! What better way to kickstart this than with one of my most recent completed reads: Taste by Kate Evangelista.
Oh yes, that Taste.
It's been on the YA Paranormal circuit for quite some time, and let me tell you, I was one reluctant reader. Zombies? Love triangle? No wonder I stayed away!
See, I just don't do zombies. Wings, fangs, blood, glitter, smoke, mythology, there's not a lot of supernatural stuff I won't buy into for YA. Dead people? Of course it's been done. They're the ones who are Death/Hades reincarnated, or maybe an angel banished to Earth to save the fate of a seemingly unknowing girl who holds all the power to save the world in her seemingly unknowing brain! How wonderfully magical and not creepy at all!
So why mess with perfection? Well, originally I thought I'd be going to the Austin Teen Book Fest--instead, I got carted off to San Antonio with the band to play against UTSA, who btw has the rudest fans ever but the nicest marching band!--and Evangelista would be there. It made sense to read one of her books first! So I picked Taste, because even though I was convinced zombies couldn't interest me (dead skin cells are bad enough on living humans) I thought...well, I enjoy torturing my brain anyway.
Annnnnnnnnnd..........................eh, it wasn't that bad. It lacked a lot in world building, and that's where I think this book would have excelled.
Spoiler Section Synopsis
Phoenix McKay, Private Eye (jk, but what is this name??) goes to boarding school because she suffers from a neglectful father and no mother. She's kind of a bad girl, I guess. She oversleeps in the library and gets stuck there after everyone else had gone back to the dorms for the day. This is a big NO NO NO because anyone who stays on campus after the school day ends is sentenced to immediate expulsion, no questions asked. Funny, you'd think at a school for rich, smart kids, they'd have been questioning this absurd rule out of sheer academic curiosity.
She basically almost gets eaten by these Twilight-looking Victorian teens, is saved by Hottie McHott aka Demitri, and we're finally into the whole story of how they're basically undead people who eat flesh but don't really eat flesh (like Twilight, they've sworn off killing humans for food). THEY'RE NOT ZOMBIES, OKAY. They're Zahmvy. Get it right, because it's going to be forced on you a lot that they're different from the stereotypical zombies. This is actually a pretty cool idea as far as YA goes, but it's overshadowed by the annoying protagonist Phoenix and how #basic she is.
See, my problem with Phoenix is her really dumb motivation to be injected with Zhamvy DNA so that she can be used as an experiment to save the Zhamvy people from their non-flesh diet.
I'm sorry...
Oh, how totally unselfish of you! Like you didn't want to be a cool paranormal mythical creature? You didn't want to have a reason to be around Demitri more? I'm sorry, I'd be totally selfish and just outright say YES, I WANT TO BE A PARANORMAL CREATURE AND HAVE A HOT PARANORMAL GUY FALL IN LOVE WITH ME. Just say it, dammit! Stop using your mom as an excuse because the doctor's couldn't save her. I call bullshit on this!
And then this lame-o love triangle of death she has going on with Demitri and his cousin Luka. Obviously, we know who she's going to choose. She had a sexallergic reaction to Demitri, even though she had like a tiny bit more chemistry with Luka.
There's some other stuff, like royalty and politics and some bitch who loves Demitri and wants to kill Phoenix. *yawn* it's hard to get excited about such a flat character. It's kind of boring after awhile, and that's why this didn't get as high of a review as I was initially expecting to give it.
