Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side by Beth Fantaskey

Jessica Packwood is a normal American teen growing up in the countryside of Pennsylvania. Or so she thinks, because Jess originally came from Romania, given to her adoptive parents by her own parents when they were about to be killed by torch-wielding peasants. The Packwoods saved her from the mob and took her back to America to raise her.

But while raising her, they told her about her past, in fairly general terms. But when a strange teenaged boy shows up at her bus stop and calls to her from across the street, he uses her original Romanian name, Antanasia. She's completely creeped out by him, and yet, when she makes her way to school, he shows up in one of his classes and seems to think that he is her fianceé. His name is Lucius Vladescue, and Jessica gets more and more creeped out by the way he stares at her and intimates that she should know him somehow.

She's even more creeped out that her best friend, Melinda, seems to think that he's hot, but when she complains about him to her mother, Jessica must swallow a bitter pill. She learns the truth about her birth parents: they were vampires, and she was a vampire princess. Shortly after she was born, she was betrothed to Lucius and the Vladescue family by her own family, the Dragomirs. Lucius is here to romance her and bring her back to Romania so she can reign as Queen over the combined Dragomir-Vladescue families, and thereby over all vampires.

But Jessica is a rationalist and has a hard time even believing that vampires can exist. Her mother, usually on her side, confesses to her that Vampires do exist, and that she studied them as a cultural anthropologist in Romania. Jessica has her own ideas for her life: she's interested in a local boy named Jake, who works on his parents' farm, she's interested in Math, and she's a sworn rationalist, who only believes in the things she can see and study with her own eyes.

But Lucius moves in with her family, into the apartment over their garage, and she has to put up with him, for now. But as he tries to romance her, she continually rejects him for Jake, even as Lucius tries to make her see that she is a princess and that she belongs to him. All his attempts only get on her bad side, until he realizes that this romance is part of a plot by his family to get Jessica/Antanasia killed and give them complete power over both families. Sickened by the thought that he might have been a part of such a disgusting plot, and by Jessica's constant rejection of him, he leaves her alone with Jake and takes up with a local spoiled rich bitch named Faith, who in no way lives up to her name.

Realizing that she does have feelings for Lucius after all, Jessica also realizes that her romance with nice, safe local boy Jake isn't what she really wants after all. But can she convince Lucius that she has changed her mind, and that she wants him when he's hurting and angry with himself and his entire family before he gets himself killed by the superstitious people of the town?

I didn't like this book. I found Lucius to be a snobby spoiled brat, and the way he came to town and seemed to just expect Jessica/Antanasia to fall into his arms annoyed me and made me want to slap him. He only partly redeemed himself when he realized how he was being manipulated by his family, but then he became annoying in a whole different way that made my hand start to itch all over again.

I didn't find myself rooting for Jessica/Antanasia, either, mainly because she ends up falling for the over-priviledged jerk. He constantly calls Jake, the boy she likes "Nice", but in a perjorative way, and because she falls for Lucius, she ends up realizing that she can't love Jake the way she loves Lucius, and that just makes me gag. I also got a Stephanie Meyer-Twlight type vibe with how she reacts after he leaves her. She can't concentrate on all the thing she used to love and ends up leaving them behind wholesale. It was almost like what made her "Jessica" disintegrated and she decided to be just Antanasia. I found that rather creepy.

So no, I didn't like it at all. I found this book distasteful to read. It was well-written, no obvious grammar flaws, but the story depressed me and made me angry to read on the heroine's behalf, and later, on my own. I would not recommend this book, because like "Twilight", I think it presents a rather poisonous example of what teenaged romance is supposed to be like. Avoid it if you can.