Liviania’s review of Necking by Chris Salvatore
Paranormal romance released by Pocket 27 April 2010

Necking starts out promising.  Gia Felice is a human publicist for a variety of supernatural authors.  Due to her line of work, she’s learned how to deal with a variety of species.  Gia knows how to keep herself safe despite her humanity and she knows how to market her clients despite their restrictions.  She’s a competent businesswoman.  And it all goes down the drain so quickly.

Chris Salvatore tries to skip over the build-up.  Necking begins with Gia’s obsession with vampire Johnny becoming dangerous.  Unfortunately, we have to take Gia’s word for why he’s so awesome.  His good qualities include deliberately annoying her and not killing humans regularly.  (This, despite the fact he kills humans quite often during the course of the story.)  Gia also starts quite firmly against being a vampire.  She changes her mind in about five minutes.

Gia becomes an extremely difficult heroine to identify with.  Salvatore acts like Gia made a long struggle about the decision to become a vampire, but in-story it certainly doesn’t feel like it.  Her easy abandonment of her family, combined with her easy forgiveness of Johnny’s murders, show her as lacking empathy.  That makes it hard to empathize with her.  We’re told she’s good at her job, but then we see her mostly behaving stupidly around the vampires.  (Even her best friend, Lola the werewolf, considers her too stupid to live.)

The main non-romantic plot involves Gia tracking down the man who made Bella Nightshade, an author and Johnny’s cousin, into a vampire.  Daniel is a nasty piece of work who likes to kill other supernaturals.  The final confrontation lies somewhere between refreshing and unsatisfying.  It would be fully refreshing if Gia remained a human struggling to navigate the human and supernatural worlds, but always managing to keep herself safe through her cleverness.  Instead, it comes as unsatisfying since there’s no bang to counteract the standard girl-falls-in-love-with-vampire-and-leaves-her-family-and-job-for-him.  (Which in turn, could carry the easily resolved mystery plot if the romance was really hot.  But Johnny struck me as bratty rather than irresistible.)

Necking isn’t terrible.  Salvatore is a competent writer.  Lola and her boyfriend Max manage to be sweet and funny.  But Necking is virtually identical to a large number of paranormal romances.  Its biggest crime is extinguishing the spark that could have made it stand out from the crowd.  (It falls firmly under what my dad refers to as second generation: All the vampires dress like subculture teenagers and listen to NIN.  Salvatore even name drops NIN’s Closer during one of the club scenes.)

Grade: D

Summary:
HE ALWAYS KNEW SHE WAS
EXACTLY HIS TYPE – B POSITIVE

Gia Felice has a Rolodex full of vampires, werewolves, witches, and aliens – not to mention the livestock suppliers, undead-friendly hotels, and sleazy bars that cater to her clients’ more carnal needs. Sometimes being he premier book publicist to the underworld can suck – literally. Especially if you’re human. Especially if you’ve got the hots for impressible Johnny and his sly half smile that shows just a little fang.
Her best friend, Lola, a werewolf, can’t talk any sense into her, and now Gia’s agreed to help Belladonna Nightshade, a New York Times Bestselling vampire author, find the supernatural killing machine who changed Bella centuries ago… if he doesn’t find Gia first. Yesterday, Gia’s biggest problem was how to get an alien with a metal skeleton through airport security. Today she’s got a bloodthirsty boyfriend dying to get into her pants, and an evil, centuries-old vampire on the hunt for her. Who knew publicity was such a deadly business?

Read an alternate scene here.