Blood Orange Soda by James Michael Larranaga

Blood Orange Soda
By James Michael Larranaga
Published: March 15, 2014
Publisher: JML
Stand-Alone
Pages: 350

Darius Hunter is a bullied high school freshman. When he drinks Blood Orange Soda to transform into a Vampire and earn respect, he soon learns life as a Vampire has its own challenges.

Set in the future on the rural landscape of St. Cloud, Minnesota where pre-Vampire teens are required by the government to take a daily Red pill to prevent their urge to bite, Blood Orange Soda is a coming of age story of love, life and death.


*Novel provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review*

My Rating: 2.5 stars

My Thoughts: 
This book was an incredibly interesting take on vampires.  It wasn't like the normal, popular vampire books that are being published now where no one knows that the vampires exist.  Instead, humans or Normals, mingle with the Vampires, they live together in harmony.  It kind of reminded me of Holly Black's The Coldest Girl In Coldtown, just in that aspect of it.  
I thought that the characters were decent.  The main character, Darius, was kind of detached and I had a really hard time connecting to him.  We never really learned a whole lot about him, and his interests and hobbies and such.  All that we really knew was that he liked music and I think that not knowing almost anything about him made it very difficult to connect to him.
Darius's best friend, Weezer, is the comedic relief, and kind of reminded me of Link from the Castor Chronicles.  He had a few funny lines but overall I just found him to be a really unnecessary character.
And then we come to the two sides of the love triangle, Shelby and Angel.  Now, I really liked Angel.  I thought that she was really nice and she kind of reminded me of myself a little bit.  My only problem with her was at the very end where she threw herself in front of Darius, or pushed him out of the way or whatever it was that she did because Darius was a Vampire and he could have dodged it himself and I felt it was really stupid of her to do that.  I also could tell that she was in love with Darius from the beginning so that kind of diminished my enjoyment of the romantic aspect of this book, which leads me into talking about Shelby.  Now I never trusted Shelby.  I just thought her reasoning for transferring schools was very odd and there was just something off about her.  And then as her and Darius's relationship starts progressing, there were just a bunch of little things that she did that made me question her motives.
Overall, I'd recommend this book if this is the kind of book that you normally would enjoy or if this is the age range that you enjoy because I do think that this book was a little young compared to what I normally read. If this isn't something that you would normally go for then I wouldn't bother picking it up

Thanks for reading!
Amber