Woo woo, secret vampire stuff!
I read the first couple of Sookie Stackhouse novels back in 2009 and then stopped as I started to watch True Blood on TV. I thought the first couple of novels were great, but the quality went down.
Book Review: The Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris
Rating:
Title & Author: The Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris
Genre: Fantasy, Mystery
Release Date: May 1, 2001
Series: The Southern Vampire Mysteries
Publisher: Ace Books
Synopsis
Sookie Stackhouse is a small-time cocktail waitress in small-town Louisiana. She’s quiet, keeps to herself, and doesn’t get out much. Not because she’s not pretty. She is. It’s just that, well, Sookie has this sort of “disability.” She can read minds. And that doesn’t make her too dateable. And then along comes Bill. He’s tall, dark, handsome–and Sookie can’t hear a word he’s thinking. He’s exactly the type of guy she’s been waiting for all her life….
But Bill has a disability of his own: He’s a vampire with a bad reputation. He hangs with a seriously creepy crowd, all suspected of–big surprise–murder. And when one of Sookie’s coworkers is killed, she fears she’s next…
I give the entire Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris three out of five hearts. This is for the entire thirteen novels and After Dead, in which Charlaine let us know what happened to all the characters after the last novel in the series.
First off this series is called differently wherever I look so I try to be consistant and stay with the name The Southern Vampire Mysteries, instead of True Blood (novels) or Sookie Stackhouse Novels.
The first couple of novels of The Southern Vampire Mysteries I gave pretty high scores, like four and five hearts. But soon after that I noticed the quality lower a lot, I did not get to give them lower than two hearts. Because they weren’t badly written, it was written in very constant quality, and the characters were great. But usually the contents of the novel and the pacing bothered me, which dragged my enjoyment of these novels down, a lot.
Sookie stays pretty much the same over the entire series, she learns a lot about herself and about her family. Sam, her boss, is super cool guy and I am really happy he has a great end to his story. I actually liked the humans better than the Faeries, Vampires, Were’s etc. I liked the way they were force to deal with the changes that they all brought. I did think that some of the events in some of the novels were very much disturbing towards humans, especially women. I am not sure what made Charlaine come up with these events.
Overall the events in these novels are okay, most of them are even a little bit tame compared to others. It gave me a whiplash some times and I think that Sookie dealt with it in a really weird way as if it was not all that bad even though she was tortured like crazy. It felt a bit unrealistic and some of the things I found sickening.
True Blood
Back in 2008 I started watching True Blood on TV. It starred Anna Paquin, Stephen Moyer, Alexander Skarsgård a.o. I thought the first three seasons, or so, were really great, but then I got bored and stopped watching.
Overall some of the TV-series was comparable with the novels, but in different order of events. Of course I can’t compare them after the third season or so.
Let me know what you thought of this book and/or tv-series!
If you have any requests for which book I should talk about next, please let me know in the comments down below.
For now, let books enrich your life!