Calling to mind the sometimes surreal, often dreamlike, and always visceral way that Francesca Lia Block infuses the City of Los Angeles with a pulsating life of its own in her many young adult novels, M. Beth Bloom‘s debut, Drain You, creates a city simmering under the summertime sun, blown dry by the desert winds, and fully alive while we spend the endless nights wandering the streets of a city built on dreams, shadows, illusions and secrets. The scene is so perfectly set, the place so vividly imagined and described, it’s very easy to lose yourself to the siren call of a city that is both alien and seductive, if only until this story ends.
Which is, of course, exactly what happens to a daughter of this city of contradictions, 17 year old Quinn Lacey. But Quinn doesn’t lose herself to the city; instead, her siren call is to a secretive, seductive young man who is entirely alien to anything she has ever known. In the early days of a sweltering summer vacation, with only the boredom of working at the video store and hanging out by the pool to look forward to, Quinn meets gorgeous James, who turns her whole world crazy. Drawn to him in a way she can’t (and doesn’t really want to) explain, Quinn’s world shifts from lazy, sun-drenched days to electric, steamy nights, full of both longing and danger as she discovers that the streets of LA are prowling with ruthless creatures hungry for life.
Drain You is most certainly a steamy read – it oozes with the heat of summer sun and the long summer nights when no matter how hard you try, sleep will not come. There’s a dreamlike quality to everything that happens to Quinn and her friends and a “whatever” vibe throughout that fits perfectly with my imaginings of teens in Los Angeles (or maybe teens anywhere). The creatures of the night who threaten Quinn and her friends are scarily real in a “I know a guy like that” kind of way, and Quinn’s desperation to save her friend Libby (and herself) raises the tension enough that my heart was beating rapidly, both from fear and and the weight of an intense first love.
- Posted by Cori