Blood and Chocolate

Annette Curtis Klause's Blood and Chocolate, certainly falls into the current Hot Zone. Vivian, an attractive seventeen year old werewolf, struggles to fit into a world that does not even acknowledge that she exists. Though she lives with her extended familiar pack, Vivian is not sure that she truly wants the future that she is being offered. In rebellion she begins to date a human boy, and she suddenly finds herself falling in love. As Vivian desperately considers revealing her true self to her beloved, Klause thoughtfully challenges her reader's to contemplate the divide between instinct and intellect. Friendship, family, sex, relationships, love, desire, death, and violence weave together this hot and fast read, leaving the reading thinking about all about what it really means to grow up and to fall in love.

The What and The Why

As a little girl I used to pack two bags when we went on long car rides. One bag carried the requisite car entertainment: crayolas, drawing pad, word games, those crazy invisible marker books that revealed all sorts of codes and could only be used once...a myriad of distractions from my little brother. The other bag was the most precious, the most well packed and the heaviest--this was my bag of vacation books. Often the first official stop was the town library, because I had simply run out of things to read at home and could not leave with just a few books for vacation--what if I finished them?
The hemming and hawing over titles, over page length, authors, genre (to this day I can still spend hours in a library or bookstore just simply trying to decide what to get) drove my family insane, especially as the books got longer and as a result heavier. At the rate I was going I had read all of the books that were appealing at the library, had moved on to tackling absurdly adult literature (Les Miserables became a February vacation read when I was about 13), and still wasn't really finding and reading "good books". Though I still love to read many of those favorites from my teenage years, I always wished that I had known about so many of the books that I get to read and teach now. As far as books go there will never be enough, but there can always be another space to find out about the good ones--the ones worth reading as a grown-up and the ones worth sharing.