Rebecca

I actually despise what most people call "chick lit" and lots of people have described the Undead series by MaryJanice Davidson as chick lit meets vampires.

I suppose that is an accurate description, but the reason I hate chick lit (in general) and the reason I find this book so hilarious is basically the same: a really shallow-seeming heroine. Here the shallowness isn't complete (Betsy has her moments and you can see that she has some deeper feelings, if you search really hard for them), but the very shallowness is part of the reason these books are so funny.

The Queen of the Vampires is obsessed with shoes? Designer names? What anyone and everyone is wearing? Too funny!

Nancy Wu, who gives voice to Betsy in this first person novel, is letter perfect. She sounds just like Betsy did in my head when I read "Undead and Unwed" for the first time.

Give this book a chance,even if you aren't a chick lit fan. You won't regret it.

I like this book. I knew I liked it before I bought the audio version.

If you like Feehan's Dark Series, this is one of the stronger enties in it, even though the author does fall in love with certain phrases that she uses OVER and OVER again, in this and future entries in the series (i.e. "his voice was a black magic weapon" and the always favored "curious melting sensation in the region of her heart").

But the audio book really suffers from a poor narrator. Juanita Parker is mostly okay, but the list of common English words that she cannot pronounce (or that she doesn't pronounce like anyone else you've ever heard) is LONG.

She can't say "believe" or "across". Her versions come out like "bleve" and "acrost". It's very distracting and gets very annoying after awhile.

All in all I liked the audiobook version of Dark Magic okay, but I could have liked it one star better with a different reader. Or with this reader after some remedial literacy training.