The Knaveheart's Curse by Adele Griffin

Maddy is a vampire, but not just any sort of vampire. She and her family are hybrid vampire/fruit bats who moved from the old world to the new to get away from the rest of the vampires. The Old Bloods hate the hybrids and act with swiftness to put down any hybrid family who dares gain some power or property.

So Maddy's family moved to New York and decided to drop their vampire habits and become normal people, albeit Vegans. Maddy is having a hard time with that, and with the whole concept of making friends in general. She likes to play pranks, pull tricks and even drink blood now and again. Her favorite target for this is a fellow schoolmate named Dakota Underhill. So when Maddy attends Dakota's ice cream birthday party without a present (which she didn't have because she wasn't invited), the taunts of the other kids make her pull a prank and steal one of Dakota's presents.

When she gets the present home, it turns out to be a weird sort of cane, and when Dakota comes to get her present back, Maddy fobs a clarinet of her sister's on Dakota. Maddy's sister Lexie has decided that, like her parents, she is musical, but she has yet to find an instrument she is good at playing. And in return for the Clarinet, Dakota decides to try and be friends with Maddy, and invites her to the local country club to play golf.

Before she goes, Maddy's family finds out that the ninth Knaveheart has entered the new world looking for a successor, and whoever this is will kill their entire family to show that they have become a Knaveheart. Meanwhile, Lexie has found someone willing to give her guitar lessons for free, but Maddy thinks her sister will be just as hopeless at the guitar as she is at all the other instruments she's tried.

But when Maddie is nearly killed by the Knaveheart on the golf course, everyone warns her to stay away from the Knaveheart and stay safe. Maddy, though, is aching to try and kill the Knaveheart, and when it's obvious that the Knaveheart has set his or her sights on Maddy's family, she's going to need help if she wants to go head to head with one of the oldest and scariest of the old world vampires. She might even have to team up with- yuck! Dakota. But can she drive away the menace that might take her entire family away from her, and save the Knaveheart's target before it's too late?

At the beginning of the book, Maddy acts like a very bratty kid. Even though she's over 400 years old, she still acts like someone of her physical age, 10 or 11, when you think she might have grown up a little more. But no, Maddy is a kid in both body and mind, no matter how old she might be. This makes readers more able to identify with her, yes, but at the same time it makes her less realistic a character. Kids who have witnessed war, starvation and desperation at close hand wouldn't act like Maddy does, and yet Maddy acts like an American kid who has never seen any of those things.

That aside, since most child readers might not realize those things, Maddy does grow up some by facing the Knave and actually starts making friends. But none of her friends are normal humans. All of them seem to be hybrids like her, and I think that's a shame because it smacks a bit of a kind of racism. Can't Maddy ever be friends with normal humans?

This book is interesting, but it has enough flaws that I really wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Annoying heroine, a kind of hidden racism and a character who really doesn't act her age or the kind of things she has seen. Not recommended.