Review – Undead and Unwed by Mary Janice Davidson (2/5 stars)

My husband and I listened to this on audio book on a car trip to South Dakota. I downloaded the audiobook out of pure curiosity. I have heard a lot about these novels and MaryJanice has written a ton of them. So I wondered what all of the hubbub was about.

In this book we meet Betsy who has just been fired from her job as a secretary. Betsy has a thing for fancy shoes and lives with her cat. One night after chasing after her cat, she is smacked by an SUV. She wakes up in the morgue only to find that she is a vampire and that she is curiously unaffected by things that seem to plague her fellow undead compatriots. Nostro, the resident evil vampire, who is trying to recruit her into his clan, kidnaps her. Another vampire, the tasty looking Eric Sinclair, is also after her to join his cause. Betsy is trying her best to resume her live before death and wants no part in vampire politics.

The quality of the reading of the audio book was very good and I have no complaints with the production of the audio book.

As a native Minnesotan I loved that this book took place in the Twin Cities. My familiarity with the setting made some parts of the book funnier than they probably would have been to a non-native. This book is not a fine work of literature. It’s full of slang, the jokes are generally stupid jokes on word play, and sometimes slapstickish. Still, the book was mildly entertaining and non-involving. My husband and I chortled at some of the jokes. It was just the right type of book to listen to in the car. I never felt that attached to it. It was easy to leave the car in the middle of the book and easy to get back into the book when we resumed driving.

I guess it depends what you want in a book. This book was an easy read, kind of fun, and very chic-centric if you know what I mean. I was surprised my husband found it as amusing as he did. It is not an intellectual read, not really that well written, and I have to admit a lot of the fashion-speak was lost on me. I am by no means a shoe expert and couldn’t really respect Betsy’s shoe obsession. I did respect the blatant-ness of Betsy’s character; Betsy’s sheer candidness and non-normal reaction to some of the situations she ended up in were hilarious at times.

Will I read more of these books? Probably not. There’s just too much fluff there; the end of this book was already boring me with the over-the-top humor and the uninspired writing. If I was stuck in the car on another trip to South Dakota, and I had absolutely nothing else to do, I might listen to the second audio book. This was just another in a series of mediocre books that I have read lately.

Here is link to the book on amazon: