After Midnight is a tale of delicious vampires (maybe) and the intrepid young ladies out to get them. Sound familiar? Three things you didn’t know about Terri: she wept when Buffy was cancelled. During the first season, she lusted after Xander instead of Angel. And this is her first vampire paranormal!

Now I happen to love paranormals. In fact, I love vampires; I’m a Christine Feehan fan. I love the basis of her vampire books: guy sees in the world in shades of gray until ~ Shazam! ~ The Girl for Him shows up and he suddenly sees in color. This is useful. It would be useful if it worked the other way too: just think how many blind dates you could dump within five minutes if right and wrong were so nicely color-coded for you. Anyway… I love Feehan. Her books are serious: serious men, serious blood, serious baddie vampires and lots of serious cave-dwelling sex.

The truth is that when you’re reading a vampire romance, you have to suspend your disbelief and just go with it. Otherwise, wouldn’t we be giggling over the incongruities? I’ve sometimes wondered whether we can have the atmospherics, the dark haired men, the shining teeth, the frightened, intelligent women… and a sense of humor about it at the same time? Hello, After Midnight! I loved this book, because it’s the kind of book which minimizes the chest heaving and maximizes the sense of humor. To be absolutely honest, this book is Jane Austen-esque. Remember Northanger Abbey?, the Austen novel that makes fun of the gothic novel?

Welcome to the new Jane Austen! I guess I would characterize this as a paranormal with a heroine whose grounded, reasonable practicality made the whole novel very funny. Add in a truly healthy dose of erotic attraction between one possible vampire and one hard-headed young regency lady, and the result is a funny, sexy pleasure!

 All the Sundays Yet to Come: A Skater’s Journey.
Kathryn Bertine.

I am likely one of very few Americans who combine a dislike of sports with an intolerance for television. There are a few sports I do like, and they are all the ones in which athleticism is disguised as something else: dancing for example, and skating. I like to watch the Olympics in skating, the moment when a girl spins in the air and comes down on her bum. The moments when she sits nervously beside to a Russian-looking coach, foolishly clutching a stuffed animal and revealing that while one needs dance lessons to mimic ballet on ice, brains are not a requirement.

All the Sundays Yet to Come is an insider’s look at the world of professional skating. I thought it would be a breathless, did-I-win, type of thing, but it’s not. Instead, it’s an incalculably odd memoir of a skater who never made the big time. She was very good, but the closest she came to fame was when Scott Hamilton stared at a poster of her and thought she was Kristi Yamaguchi. That’s the kind of memoir it is: a story of moments gone awry.

Kathryn wanted desperately to be in the Ice Capades, from the time she was little. So she won a spot and they went bankrupt two weeks before she was due to start. She turned to a wild group of skaters called Hollywood on Ice and began a bizarre descent into anorexia. It sounds tragic — and it would be, if it wasn’t for the occasional brilliance of her descriptions.

Memoirs are like reality TV: they cater to the same greedy imagination. How the heck did Kathryn Bertine’s mother read this book and not want to kill herself afterwards? I’ll give you an example of what a great writer Kathryn is:

“If I wanted a toy, someone bought it for me. I was driven to school in the silver BMW every morning, though the building was less than two hundred yards from my house. I charged books to my parents account at Womwrath’s bookstore on a near-daily basis. “Spoiled” was not a concept I understood at the time; books and toys were things that I needed. Mom was busy, Dad was busy, Pete was busy. Books and toys were my busyness… New toys and personal attention felt like one and the same, and neither my parents nor I fully understood that what I liked better and remembered more clearly than all the toys and books themselves was having my parents take me to the stores. There, I would seek out the longest checkout line to stand in, to make the experience last as long as possible.”

I read things like this and I think I?m not such a bad mom afterall: overworked, crazed, and driven crazy by my children. But one of the reasons I’m crazy is that I?m always trying to write with someone sprawled on my study floor reading or whining or screaming at the top of their lungs. If anyone is searching out the longest lines at the grocery store, it’s me, so that I can read more of The National Enquirer before my food has to be priced and they throw me out of the store.

This is a weird, fun memoir that takes apart the world of professional skating and puts it back together in ways you’d never expect.