Review: Love and Fangs by Stephanie Blough

Title:  Love and Fangs
Author:  Stephanie Blough
Release Date:  March 9th 2011
Publisher:  Xlibris
Source:  Bought
Kindle and Nook Lendable:  Yes

Barnes and Noble Description:

Maddy was just a small town girl living in Cherry Rock, Tennessee. On the first day of her senior year in high school, she meets the mysterious Dylan and fate changes her life forever.

My Thoughts:

Maddy's life is about to take a new direction.  She is now a senior in high school.  When she gets there, she sees this gorgeous boy.  She's never seen him before and is instantly attracted to him.  They lock eyes and he comes over to talk to her.  His name is Dylan and he has just moved to Cherry Rock, TN from Montana.  He is a complete gentleman and even carried her bag to class and is constantly complimenting her.  How sweet is that!  They end up having every class together.  Is it a coincidence or is it fate?

Maddy is the new captain on the cheerleading team.  As she was watching the football players practice, she noticed Dylan and he was on the team.  Maddy has never been about putting boys above her school, until Dylan.  There is just something about him that she can't resist.  He's good looking, pale, cold, and extremely sweet.  Who could resist?

Later on in the week, there is a murder outside the woods at her school.  Maddy and her best friend, Amber, sneak out back to look for Dylan, who had just went outside to his car, to make sure he was ok.  It wasn't Dylan and he left a note for Maddy saying that he was fine.  A few weeks later, there is another murder.  Maddy and Amber go through the same door again and see the killer in the woods.  Soon Amber and her parents end up missing and Maddy can't help but blame herself.  If they had just stayed inside of the school, they wouldn't have seen the killer and became his next targets.  Even though Maddy is falling for Dylan, she can't help but think that this all started when his family came to town.  Is he who he says he is?  Will she be the next target on the killer's list?

I thought this was a really good book.  The writing needed a lot of editing, but I try to overlook that.  This is a debut novel from the author and as soon as I saw the cover and the name, I had to check it out.  The cover is a bit cheesy, but it's so cheesy that it caught my attention, lol.  "Love" would be romance and "Fangs" would obviously be vampires according to the cover picture and I am a sucker when it comes to YA vampire romance.

I love that the setting was here in TN.  Maddy lives about an hour from Nashville, so she's a country music lover like me.  She even gets to meet Kenny Chesney in the book.  How awesome that would be!! 

I found very little of the book to be believable.  Well, obviously we know the book is about vampires and we know those are fiction, but I'm talking about the storyline as a whole.  Maddy develops special powers, hears voices, and can see a ghost.  The story is also very choppy.  I felt that there was so much more the author could have delivered in the plot to make her story a little bit more entertaining and believable.  So many details seem to have been left out.  There is one scene where Dylan wants Maddy to go with him to a school dance and after she turns him down because they don't know each other very well, it is never mentioned again.  Stephanie could have wrote in about them going on dates, more activities outside of classes, and even just a little more detail, in general, of what the characters looked like and what they wore.  So basically, I think that it was just lacking a bit and could have used more storyline.  She really had the potential for a rating of 5 stars with the idea of her book if she just would have extended it a bit and made the reader feel like there wasn't anything missing. 

Overall, I overlooked most of the editing and enjoyed the story.  A little less than what I went in anticipating, but I was still so engrossed in it that I read it all in one sitting.  Love, fangs, special powers, and mystery are all apart of Stephanie's debut and if you can overlook a bit of editing mistakes, I think that you'll enjoy this too.

3 1/2 Stars