Title Fanged Princess Author Elisabeth Wheatley Cover Art --- Publisher Chengalera Press - 2012 First Printing Chengalera Press - 2012
	Title Fanged Outcast Author Elisabeth Wheatley Cover Art --- Publisher --- First Printing ---
	Category Fantasy Warnings None Main Characters Hadassah, Damien, Madelyn, Devin, Chase Main Elements Vampires Website Inkspelled Faery

Fanged Princess

This short novella of Hadassah, the daughter of the Vampire King, was an action packed adventure, with a core that revolved around family. The family that means more to you than your own life, and the family that you wished you had not been born into. In a world where vampires and humans are forbidden to fall in love, Hadassah must help Damien and Madelyn escape, before her uncle (her father's main enforcer) captures and kills the human girl.

I enjoyed this tale because Hadassah was a strong female protagonist, something we aren't seeing enough lately in YA literature where the girl spends half the novel moaning about how she's not good enough for whatever male she happens to have her eye on, and the other half needing to be rescued by him because she was too stupid not to keep ending up in danger of her life. Our vampire princess in this story however is perfectly capable of taking care of herself, and of some of the male characters too! In fact, Hadassah doesn't even really have a love interest in this story, let alone some cliched love triangle. It was also wonderful to have a tale that focued on the love between siblings, about how much Damien meant to Hadassah, and what she would do to ensure his happiness at her own expense.

On the negative side, with the story being so short and written in the first person, the only character you really get to know is Hadassah herself. What we know about everyone else is seen through her eyes and her thoughts. Thus don't really get a chance to get attached to anyone else. Madelyn especially was a bit of a 2-dimensional damsel in distress, we know almost nothing about her history or personality. Frankly I wondered what Damien saw in her from what little we saw. And Uncle Devin the same, the "bad guy" of the story, though he was rather more interesting since Hadassah had quite a few dealings with him in her past. Finally, I would also have liked to know more about the world they live in, the way the vampire society worked, where the rest of the supernaturals fit in, and even more about the Huntsmen. This was just a glimpse into what could be a really fascinating world.

But at 93 pages, about the only thing one could reasonably flesh out is Hadassah herself and that was well done. I consider this novella as a kind of teaser to get people interested in the rest of the series.