Fangs for Nothing by Adrianne Ambrose

Urban FantasyYoung Adult

Author: Adrianne Ambrose
Publisher: Self Published
Published: June 3rd, 2011
Rating: ♥♥♥♡♡

Grab some garlic and start sharpening your mother’s wooden spoons because there are vampires living in the most unlikely of places.I’ve always wanted to meet a vampire. Not to stake some poor bloodsucker as he sleeps in his coffin or have some sexy vampiress bite me on the neck, but just to see a creature so rare and infamous. What can I say? Some people want to sail to Easter Island, others want to fling themselves out of an airplane, I want to shake hands with a vampire. Well, maybe I should prioritize getting a girlfriend first, but a vampire sighting is pretty high up on the list. Trust me, a lot of kids my age dream about it. Like my two best friends, Rini and Xander. We spent half the summer searching the most notorious cities in the United States for the undead, but so far, no luck.That’s why it came as a total shock to discover a living, breathing vampire in our hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. (Okay, so he’s more undead and not breathing, but you get the picture.) At first we were kind of excited, but then pretty freaked because it turns out our new fanged friend has a hold on the city’s teenage population and a specific thirst for their blood. Which, in a word—bites.

My Review:

Fangs for Nothing is a story about a group of kids who like to go vampire hunting! Well, not in the Buffy sense necessarily. More like hunting for vampires just to see if they exist. The main character, Sherbie, is a boy who’s just your average looking, loser-feeling teenager. But things for him and his friends are about to flip upside down when the very thing that they’re hunting for finds them.

This was a cute story and with a friend named Xander and several Buffy references, it was fun to see the damage a group of kids could do trying to put together their very own Scooby gang. I think I was expecting more humor from it based on some reviews I read, and while there was some, it wasn’t necessarily the full-out vampire story parody that I was expecting.

I did like the friendships between the group of kids and I really liked Xander. Despite being this extremely good looking guy, he didn’t seem like the typical shallow person you would expect him to be. I liked Sherbie too, but he was a bit too insecure at times.

Which brings me to the thing that bugged me most about this book and that was the extreme insecurities of most of the teenagers in this world. I can see that the message going on here was to portray that kids shouldn’t be so insecure and should love themselves for who they are. But it got to be a bit tiring to read about. I know I was insecure as a teenager just like anyone else, but being that I’m twenty-five now, I’m kind of over most of that so I couldn’t relate to that as much as a teen reading this would be able to. Like with how Rini was acting near the end was more annoying than anything to me personally.

But despite that, I can see that the overall message here was revolving around that so I can’t fault it too much, especially since it is a young adult book. Not many stories these days actually have a message, so I can’t help but appreciate that this one did — and a good message at that!

Overall this was cute and entertaining. I loved that Cedar Point as mentioned because I’m from Michigan and I definitely have been to Cedar Point many-a-times. I liked that there was a moral to the story as well. So if you like young adult urban fantasy that’s starring a guy instead of your typical chick heroine, then you’ll probably like this one.

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