Never Bite A Boy On The First Date - Tamara Summers

Never bite a boy on the first date is a 2010 teen novel by Tamara Summers. It was released on March 4th and is 270 pages long.

Kira used to be called Phoebe until she was killed in a car crash then turned into a vampire. Being a 16 year old vampire isn't all that fun though as Kira soon found out. Not having been turned for very long, Kira started dating Zach and the two were inseparable. So inseparable that when he learns that she is a vampire, he asks her to turn him so they can be together forever. When she doesn't agree, Zach near enough kills himself so Kira doesn't have much of a choice to turn him. Now she is stuck with him.

Having turning Zach, Kira and her vampire family have had to move to Massachusetts. Just when she thought things were going to be normal again, it seems that there is another vampire in town and he has killed the most popular high school jock. Kira's family instantly assume it was her because of what happened with Zach but she swears that it wasn't. Not wanting to face their punishment, Kira is on a mission to find out who the real killer is but there are three suspects. Daniel, Milo and Rowan. Problem is, they are all pretty hot and Kira can't decide who to trust. All she knows is that there is something weird about all of them.

To be fair, this book is very much for teenagers but I couldn't help but love it anyway. Kira acts and talk exactly how you would expect from a teenager but she was so funny with it. Unlike other vampire novels, she doesn't instantly become more wiser and grown up. She was turned aged 16 and she is stuck that way in both mind and body. She makes jokes and puns about being a vampire which was something I really liked. It was quite funny that she would make fun of herself or realise how bad the puns she was using really were. It was things like that that gave the story a more light-hearted feel throughout.

I loved how Kira explained that 'if you bite it you buy it' as explained by her vampire mother. Fairly reasonable I would say. If only Kira had actually listened properly though because she ends up stuck with Zach who is now the crazy ex boyfriend who wont leave her alone. Hopefully she has learnt her lesson.

The three boys, Daniel, Milo and Rowan were good and interesting characters that could have been a lot better with some more development but I understand that teenagers can sometimes have a short attention span so that could be the reason behind the length of the book. I would have really liked to have gotten to know each of the boys a bit better before the book ended but that wasn't to be. Love triangles are very common in these kinds of books now, especially after Twilight but this is the first where there was a love square and it made for an interesting change because the boys were so different from each other.

I don't really like the whole murder mystery aspect of these books because they can be too drawn out and take away from the parts of the story that I really like. This time though I really enjoyed this aspect of the story and I think a big part of that was down to how it was told. Even right up until the last minute although some of the characters are ruled out, I still couldn't figure out who was the killer. The twist was a good one and I was glad that it wasn't completely predictable.

As the book is quite short, there is a lot missing from the story. The characters lack real development and the ending is extremely rushed. It seemed as though something clicked in Kira's head about the investigation and just when she realised what was going on, everything was over. I would have liked for the ending to be drawn out a little more and to have been given more closure about what had happened.