Emma is a 17 year old girl with a "seizure condition" (as she calls it). One day after having a seizure on the soccer field after being maliciously smacked by one of her teammates, she runs away and is attacked by a vampire: Wirtz. In the middle of his feeding, however, she has another seizure, and when she wakes up a few days later in the hospital, she discovers she has become part vampire. In addition, she has a connection with Wirtz's mind, and she knows he is coming for her, so she runs away again so he won't harm her family.
The beginning of Throat was great, because a lot happened, very quickly. Then the book dragged for a few hundred pages. Yes, Emma did learn some information about vampires, but mostly a large chunk of the book was about her waiting for the vampire that turned her to find her so they could fight to the death. I liked Emma because she is very tough and independent; she is prepared to fight Wirtz to save her little sister. Kudos to Nelson as well for the original take on vampires. There are two types of vampires, the Verloren (evil) and the Sonnen (who believe that a sort of solar eruption will someday save them, and take blood from people with a exacto knife and disinfect the cut afterwards, leaving their victim resting at home safe and sound). Those names are based in German, as are all other vampiric terms in the book. The vampires are not the perfect "Twilight" vampires, who have amazing willpower and get astounding beauty to boot. They are much deeper than that, definitely one of the highlights of the story. The last little thing I wish the author had done was go a bit farther with Emma at the end. I wanted to see more of what happened to her. Overall, this book is a 3.5 or 3.75. In terms of food, I'm going to borrow from Elizabeth's last review and say it is like a orange cream chocolate (chocolate on the outside, orange on the inside). You first bite it, and the chocolate outside is yummy. But then you get to the cream, and it's merely okay, a bit of a disappointment because you were hoping for raspberry. It's a quick read if you don't let yourself get bogged down in all the pages of Emma waiting for Wirtz.
Here is the author's website: http://www.ranelsonbooks.com/
I read this too, and i thought if was a bit more like a pasta dish of some sort, a twist on a very much over used idea. However, I did like the way this author did vampires, and there were definitely lots of very original ideas.
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