Fang Girl Review

TITLE Fang Girl
AUTHOR Helen Keeble
PUBLICATION September 11, 2012 by HarperTeen
READ June 22, 2012

Things That Are Destroying Jane Greene’s Undead Social Life Before It Can Even Begin:

1) A twelve-year-old brother who’s convinced she’s a zombie.
2) Parents who are begging her to turn them into vampires.
3) The pet goldfish she accidentally turns instead.
4) Weird superpowers that let her rip the heads off of every other vampire she meets.(Sounds cool, but it doesn’t win you many friends.)
5) A pyschotic vampire creator who’s using her to carry out a plan for world domination.

And finally:
6) A seriously ripped vampire hunter who either wants to stake her or make out with her. Not sure which.

Being an undead, eternally pasty fifteen-year-old isn’t quite the sexy, brooding, angst-fest Jane always imagined....

Helen Keeble’s riotous debut novel combines the humor of Vladimir Tod with Ally Carter’s spot-on teen voice. With a one-of-a-kind vampire mythology and an irresistibly relatable undead heroine, this uproarious page-turner will leave readers bloodthirsty for more.

Helen Keeble is onto something here, with Fang Girl she has created a hilarious, unique story that put a fresh twist on the old vampire. In Keebles world vampires move at the speed of light, could care less about crucifixes and have strong OCD tendencies.  I laughed out loud way too many times to count and I came to care about a lot of the characters. We meet Xanthe Jane Green as she wakes up 6 feet under ground and comes to realise that she is slowly being dug out of her grave by her sire. When her sire is run off by, presumably, a vampire hunter Jane is left to her own devices as a newborn vampire who has absolutely no idea what is going on.

Xanthe (or Jane as she would rather be referred) was a hilarious, relateable character.  She was thrust into the life of the undead and abandoned by the one person who was supposed to show her the way.  She was the perfect 15 year old, sassy & painfully clumsy girl and I totally got her.  Of course a 15 year olds first intuition is to go home and she does just that. Once she is home I fell in love with her family.  We have supportive parents (VERY supportive) and a quick witted, steampunk obsessed little brother.  There was a very unique family dynamic created as soon as Jane headed home and it was morbid yet so very sweet. There are so many quotable passages in this novel and I would love to throw some in here, but I did read an ARC so I am trying to refrain.  All in all I loved her family!

There are a lot of secondary characters thrown into the mix; the godfather of the vampires Hokan, his minion Ebon, Janes sire Lily among others. I thought they were all very well developed in their own way and grew to like/despise them throughout the story.  There were so many people in this who could have been the bad guy and my perspective on that changed throughout the novel, mainly because Jane flip flopped quite a bit.  I will say that she was a little too quick to trust, but hey, as I stated before she was a 15 year old girl!

This was the perfect mix of paranormal elements and comedy, I went into this one expecting a lot and I was not let down in the slightest.  Keeble took a paranormal entity that I have read so much about and spiced it up just enough to make it feel brand new.  It was the perfect change of pace for me in a sea of dark paranormal and gritty contemporary novels. I got exactly what I wanted out of this one and it comes highly recommended from me.