Dead Until Dark - Charlaine Harris

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 kind of guy she's been waiting for all her life.

But Bill has a disability of his own: He's a vampire. Worse than that, hangs with a seriously creepy crowd, with a reputation for trouble - of the murderous kind.

And when one of Sookie's colleagues is killed, she begins to fear she'll be next ...

I started this book having some idea of what was going to happen; the whole cliché vampire thing was actually starting to annoy me for a while there. For some reason, however, I decided to pick this book up and read it. I didn't know much about the True Blood book series--I'd read one of the graphic novels and have watched parts of the first season of the TV show--so I wasn't really sure what to expect. I was giddy to realize that the book was almost exactly the same as what I'd remembered from the show, and I liked that. Not many book to movie/book to tv show adaptations do that, that I know of anyway, and it was refreshing to see that someone's idea remained theirs throughout different mediums. Anyway, I'd give this book a 4/5, because it kept me entertained and I wanted to read more and know more about these creatures.

 Some might hate me for saying this, but I felt that the main character, Sookie, was really, really annoying at times. She was the stereotypical man-loving girl who didn't do anything without the say-so from her boyfriend. That's one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to female lead characters. I like characters with a lot of backbone, characters that can stand and fight by themselves. It seemed that this character just couldn't do anything without consulting her boyfriend or her brother, it's like, without them she was useless. I just couldn't get past it for a while, and when I did, I realized that she'll probably learn more and be able to stand up for herself more later on in the series.

I'm already addicted and I can't wait to see what Harris has planned for the next novel.