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Undead and Unpopular

MaryJanice Davidson

Published 2006             175 pages

Synopsis

Betsy Taylor, Queen of Vampires, is celebrating her 31st birthday and her 1st anniversary of being dead (or perhaps that should be undead.)  She has told her friends that she doesn’t want a party but she is sure that they are planning a surprise party for her. 

She is trying to plan her summer wedding to Sinclair but it doesn’t help that he is avoiding having anything to do with it and deciding to give up drinking blood in honour of her birthday is just making her cranky.  And nobody likes a cranky vampire. 

Jessica her best friend since childhood has been diagnosed with cancer and this leads Betsy to think that maybe converting her friend to become a vampire might be a good idea.

With a delegation of European vampires arriving to pay their respects to her, a baby brother to baby sit, unexpected guests dropping by and a phone that just won’t stop ringing she has plenty to keep her occupied.  And that’s before she deals with the zombie in the attic….

The Review

I usually really enjoy reading MaryJanice Davidson.  I’ve been a big fan of her brand of vampire chick lit ever since “Undead and Unwed” but I found myself feeling somewhat disappointed after reading “Undead and Unpopular.” 

My first gripe with it was the length of the book.  It barely qualifies as more than a novella and in total it took just over 2 hours to read from cover to cover. 

My second gripe is that the lack of plot development in the story left me feeling like this was just filler between the last book and the next book in the series – probably written in a hurry to make a deadline. 

My third gripe is that I didn’t read the novella “A Fiend In Need” in the collection titled “Dead and Loving It” and I’m now very confused about what happened to George the fiend (now called Garrett) to change him from a fiend into a normal(ish!) vampire.  And it isn’t explained anywhere in Undead and Unpopular.  Yes, I know this is my own fault - but somehow I can’t help but think that the author could have put a paragraph or two in to explain the dramatic change.

The plots in the Undead series are often quite thin and usually it adds to the whole charm of the stories but really nothing very much happens in “Undead and Unpopular”.  The most exciting thing, the zombie in the attic, is just skated over without our heroine even forming a hypothesis on how a zombie ended up rotting and stumbling about in her attic.  I know she’s an airhead, but come on!  If I found a zombie in my attic I would give some thought to how it got there, if only to stop such an occurrence ever happening again.

If you are new to MaryJanice Davidson I wouldn’t start with this book, I’d check out “Undead and Unwed” or “Undead and Unemployed” first. 

All that said, “Undead and Unpopular” is the fifth book in the Undead / Betsy series and it contains all of the characters that we’ve come to know and love.  So after reading the previous books and getting to know all the characters it’s a bit like visiting with old friends.  Established fans of Betsy should still enjoy this book.  It’s not a bad read, just a little disappointing when compared to the author’s earlier work.

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