Book Review: Insatiable

I was so excited to read Meg Cabot's Insatiable when I heard that it was kind of a spoof on the current vampire craze in pop culture. Meg Cabot is one of my favorite humor writers; her Boy series is so funny. Maybe my expectations were too high, because I didn't really think that Insatiable was all that great.

Meena Harper is a dialogue writer for a soap opera called Insatiable. She also happens to have a supernatural ability to know how a person is going to die when she meets them. (Although what she sees can change if they change their course, which they often do based upon advice that she doles out.) Obviously this makes relationships of all types difficult.

Here's one more fact about Meena--she is sick and tired of the vampire craze. A rival soap opera, Lust, features a vampire plot that is killing in the ratings. So when the higher-ups tell Meena that they are going to incorporate vampires into their storyline, she's even extra pissed.

On the bright side, she meets a Romanian prince named Lucian, and she doesn't have any visions regarding his death! Amazing! Well, there's a reason for that; she can't see how he dies because he's already dead. He's a vampire. But Meena doesn't find this out until after she's slept with him. Oops. And she learns this tidbit from a Vatican-employed vampire hunter named Alaric.

To me, the storyline was pretty average. If she was spoofing the current vampire craze, I didn't really get it. She employed most of the same plot tricks that vampire writers use. Only at this point, it's all been done before.

Even worse, I didn't feel that the humor in this book was anywhere near the level that it was in The Boy Next Door, Boy Meets Girl, or Every Boy's Got One. I don't remember laughing out loud even once, something that is pretty rare for a Meg Cabot novel.

All in all, I'd say that this book is worth the read, because it is mostly lighthearted and fun, but I'd wait until it is out in paperback. Especially because there is a sequel, which of course made this book disappointingly lack closure.