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The Cure For The Curse

Patrick Vaughn

Published 2006             210 pages

Synopsis

Warrenna isn’t thrilled when her parents suddenly decide to move to a small desert town in Arizona.  Forced to suddenly leave Washington in the middle of the night they didn’t even let her say good bye to her friends. 

It was a night of surprises for Renna because her parents finally revealed to her that they were vampires, worse they told her the truth about her birth.  Renna is vampire too and has been ever since she was born.  This with hindsight certainly explained a lot to Renna who had always wondered why she had been unable to resist sucking on the bloody cut of a boy who was injured in the school playground when she was much younger.

Renna’s parents explained to her that they are vampire hunters, part of an organization that resists the temptations of the blood in order to avoid turning into vampire beasts that would kill humans.  Part help group and part religious sect ‘The Orphans’ kill the vampires who prey on humans and they try to save the human victims of the vampires from turning into vampires themselves by welcoming them into their group.

All this seems irrelevant to Renna, she never wanted to be a vampire and doesn’t relish the thought of spending the rest her life fighting her vampire curse.  Attending a new school she feels isolated and alone and very different to the other kids who biggest problems seem to be what college they are going to attend.  She certainly doesn’t need or want to make friends with any of them; after all she is so different to them.

Thomas attends the same school as Renna, a popular boy with many friends; he can’t understand what it is about Renna that captures his attention.  He feels so sad around her and yet he also feels strangely connected to her because she seems to be able to paint his dreams… but with Renna and her family the target of a human vampire hunter will he ever get the chance to find out more about her?

The Review

This is a book targeted at a young adult audience, and it deals with the issues that most teenagers deal with at the time of life when they leave high school.  Will they still all be friends once they have moved away to different colleges, how are their lives going to change and how will they deal with the new responsibilities that they are going to have?  It also addresses the issues of the isolation and quiet desperation that most teenagers feel at some point in their teenage years.  Plus, it has vampires too!

I enjoyed reading this book too, even though my teenage years are well behind me.  (I don’t think you ever quite forget the teenage angst of feeling that you are in someway different from everyone else and nobody understands your problems.) 

Of course when you are a teenage vampire you really are different to everyone else and they really wouldn’t understand your problems so Thomas’s acceptance of Renna as a vampire is touching and yet as we delve into Thomas’s secrets we find out that he is not a ‘normal’ human either.

The vampires in this book have some traditional vampire characteristics.  They appear as normal humans but can transform into a monstrous creatures of the night and they can’t go out in sunlight or touch holy objects. They can be either good or evil depending on whether they resist the curse or give in to their vampire cravings.

The Cure For The Curse is part romance, part fantasy and part thriller and it adds up to a fast paced exciting read.  I wish there had been more books like this written when I was a teenager myself. 

Recommended reading for teenage vampire fans everywhere.

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