When you were young, what was your favorite Halloween costume? Even better if you have pictures to share!

My absolute favorite costume from when I was a kid is one I can’t remember wearing – for good reason.  I was just over 1 year old at the time.  It was a tiger costume that a friend of the family made and gave to my parents after I was born.

Of course, the costume was so well-made that it got passed on to my brothers, who each wore it in turn.  Then my parents boxed it up and put it away, only to pull it out in time to give to Dee and I for our kids to wear!

I’m not sure what we’re going to do with the costume now – probably box it up and pass it on to someone else in the family when they have a little one the same age…

As for costumes as I grew older – I can’t remember many of them, but think that a vampire was one of my standard go-to costumes.  Mostly because it just required a vinyl cape & plastic fangs.  The mask was optional, but made me feel cooler:

(Note Ben the Happy Transformer and David the Tiger as we prepare to go trick-or-treating together)

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My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Even though a 30-year old male is not the target audience for this satire of the vampire/paranormal romance novels that seem to be spontaneously appearing on the shelves of bookstores everywhere, I found I did enjoy this novel for what it was – a light, humorous take on the subject matter that is sure to be engaging for teens and genre-fans who can take a little good-natured ribbing.

Eighteen year-old Algonquin “Alley/Ali/Gonk” Rhodes is the self-proclaimed Ice Queen of the “Vicious Circle” – a clique of close-knit friends who not only run the school newspaper (blog), but somehow are allowed to turn the escapades of their classmates into gossip-rag fodder for mass publication. One of their favorite topics of ridicule is the excessive efforts teenage girls at the school make to try to nab a vampire boyfriend; in Alley’s school, dating the undead appears to be the epitome of cool.

Alley acts above all of that, clinging to her reputation and her independence like a badge. But when reviewing a band at a local venue for her paper’s music column, she falls head-over-heels in love with Doug, who, she belatedly realizes, is not really a really-cute goth boy, but rather a zombie hipster who shares her eclectic taste in music.

Selzer’s world is intriguing – vampires, werewolves, and zombies do exist, and they live (mostly) peacefully alongside humanity. Of course, there was that whole issue with Mega Mart raising and enslaving zombies for a cheap workforce, but now that the lawsuit has been settled and all those zombies are free to live their lives coexist, people have pretty much accepted the “post-humans”, and aside from all the vapid teenage girls wanting to date (and eventually become) “post-humans”, things are pretty normal.

I had a little bit of trouble believing in the character of Alley – here’s a bright young teenager with the scathing wit of a college junior who appears to be able to psychoanalyze her own motives in staying single, yet it takes her a couple of dates (and 60-something pages) to discover that Doug is a zombie. She explains this incongruity near the end of the novel, but by then I’d already written it off as something just to get past and treat the novel as a fluffy, witty (but not sparkly) book that will surely be snapped up by teenagers anxious for a novel take on both teenage romances and the paranormal. This isn’t a book I’ll be hanging on to myself, but if you know someone 13-18 in your life, they’ll probably enjoy giving it a read.

Note: I received this book as part of a contest giveaway.

View all of my reviews on Goodreads

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