Tantalize Review

Quincie Morris has never felt more alone. Her parents are dead, and her hybrid-werewolf first love is threatening to embark on a rite of passage that will separate them forever. Then, as she and her uncle are about to unveil their hot vampire-themed restaurant, a brutal murder leaves them scrambling for a chef.

Can Quincie transform their new hire into a culinary Dark Lord before opening night? Can he wow the crowd in his fake fangs, cheap cape, and red contact lenses — or is there more to this earnest face than meets the eye? As human and preternatural forces clash, a deadly love triangle forms, and the line between predator and prey begins to blur. Who’s playing whom? And how long can Quincie play along before she loses everything?
Taken from GoodReads.

Tantalize details the story of Quincie, a teenager living in the heart of Texas and a world inundated with werewolves and vampires. It's the aftermath of her parents' death, and she's surrounded by a world of strange, losing her first love to the werewolf curse, trying to balance her life working at a vampire restaurant, and desperately trying maintain a semblance of normalcy in her crazy world. Will she be able to find her stride, or will she lose everything in the process?

I actually won Tantalize a long time ago, but I never got around to reading it. To be honest, I was really wary of yet another story merging the lore of werewolves and vampires, so I figured I'd wait until I had a lull in my reading schedule to really focus on the heart of the story. Written by author Cynthia Leitich Smith, Tantalize works on the premise that the main character lives in a world where werewolves and vampires are known entities, rather than hidden ones. Written in a clear voice with a definite unique writing style, Tantalize is clearly an effort to expand upon the original lore of such stories and invent a new type of life for vampires, werewolves, and humans coexisting. In that way, this book succeeded.

However, I'm going to be brutally honest...I really didn't enjoy Tantalize all that much. I felt that a lot of the prose was dumbed down - something that bugs me about some YA books because I truly don't believe YA literature has to be dumb, or plain, or any less than adult novels. Rife with stereotypes and overt name-dropping of Texas landmarks, more often than not, the plot line of Tantalize was disrupted by these oddly placed details. Furthermore, I felt that the plot had a lot of promise, and it truly had the potential to be compelling, but the climax was really anticlimactic for me, and I doubt that was supposed to happen. I also had an extremely hard time relating to Quincie as an MC. In fact, I rarely, if ever, felt anything for her.

I hate giving bad reviews. My followers know this, but I have to be honest, or I have zero integrity as a book blogger. So, in all honesty, Tantalize just didn't work for me. I give it a 2 out of 5, and though I'm sure there is an audience for this book, I wasn't the right one. I will, however, recommend it to more of a MG audience, and I would say that fans of fantasy novels probably have a decent chance of enjoying it. Have any of you read Tantalize? What did you think?