Sienna Mercer
HarperCollins Publishers (2007)
ISBN 9780060871154
Reviewed by Maya Landers (age 10) for Reader Views (2/08)
The content of “My Sister the Vampire #2: Fangtastic!” was not nearly as vampire-oriented as I had anticipated. For instance, the vampires depicted in this book were the very opposite of traditional vampires: it was against the law to bite humans, and there hadn’t been a record of a bite for thousands of years. I had to ask myself, what is a vampire if not a biter and bloodsucker? Since their number-one rule was to stay undercover, I thought that it was extremely dim-witted of the so-called vampires to slouch around in clothes that stood apart from their peers and to refuse to act like their schoolmates. If you really are trying to hide your identity, you would try to fit in, not dress like and act like an alien!
The two main characters, Olivia and Ivy, were more interested in applying their make-up than focusing on the task at hand. The “enemy” was only Serena Star, celebrity reporter — not exactly a deadly force of evil. She was trying to prove that there really were vampires in the world, although her motivation was unclear. Since they wore wildly different clothes, did wildly different things (would a normal eighth-grader sleep in a coffin?!), and went to wildly different places, it seems that it would have been fairly easy for Star to distinguish them from the rest of the crowd. Their “secret” meeting places were right out in the open — a public graveyard! In fact, any vampire meeting place was marked, quite obviously, with an upside-down V. Since Star missed these obvious clues, she didn’t seem to be a real threat to Olivia and Ivy. Most of the vampire characters worried about Star’s revelations, when in reality Star hardly seemed to be even an annoyance.
Olivia and Ivy are identical twins, yet no one notices. They go to the same school, and to most of the same classes, and yet no one bats an eyelash. I thought that this was strange because, first of all, how could no one notice when they are together almost all the time? And, second, why would they want to keep it a secret?
I would not recommend “My Sister the Vampire #2: Fangtastic!” to my friends because I thought that it did not do a very good job of illustrating vampire, and I especially didn’t like how the “clothes and make-up” part of Olivia and Ivy’s life was emphasized, rather than the “secretive vampire” part of their lives.
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