I am halfway through the second book (on audio) and I am still in love with Sookie and her world. Actually, I am so obsessed that I plan to pretend it’s work by writing a paper on it. This hasn’t happened to me since Buffy.

I think you’ll enjoy it. The prose is somewhat sparse, and it’s not a dense read at all, but I think it’s rewarding. As for me, I plan to watch the TV show now that I’ve finished the book. I think Bill was perfectly cast, but I didn’t picture Anna Paquin as Sookie — someone like a younger Heather Graham would have been my choice. Guess I’ll have to watch it and see!

Jill,

I agree with you, and with Ana, that Sookie has some irritating quirks. I share her race, gender and nationality, but I feel like so different from her personally that it’s hard to relate sometimes. I tend to be curious about everything all the time, and Sookie is really only interested in what affects her or her friends directly. I find myself hoping she’ll ask the questions that I would (first of all, to Bill: “How and why did you go vamp??”). But it’s her story, and she’s interesting and well drawn enough to keep me reading it.

RTP – I haven’t read Kim Harrison, but she is on my list. Do you like that series better than Sookie?

RfP — That’s interesting that urban fantasy seems more inclined to take on the social issues of intermixing than paranormal romance. Maybe it’s seems sexier to enter a new and separate world.

Although, now that you mention it, I have read a romance, Cynthia Eden’s Hotter After Midnight, in which the heroine is a telepathic shrink and the hero is a shapeshifting cop. In that world, SOME humans do know all about the “Others” in their midst, although I think the sense of seismic societal change that Harris conveys is absent.

Unique portrayal of vampires as an oppressed minority. … I found myself intensely interested in the vampire mythology Harris created. We learn quickly that the invention of synthetic blood, coupled with the acceptance of a theory that vampires are just humans who suffer from a virus, led to civil rights being granted to them just a few years prior to the start of the story.

In my reading, that’s become a fairly common take on vampires. There was a rash of such scenarios following Laurell K Hamilton (Guilty Pleasures, 1993) and it may even have started earlier. I haven’t read the Sookie books, so perhaps there’s a new wrinkle in the mythology, but the basic outline sounds very familiar.

You might be interested in some of the urban fantasy of the last 5-10 years. It’s almost a hallmark of the genre’s current form, I think, that vampires, werewolves, etc, live among humans, with the resultant culture clashes. Kim Harrison’s mythology is one of the more interesting I’ve read: a quarter of the world’s population was wiped out by a genetic modification to the tomato. The till-then-hidden magical populations “came out” at that point, as they were immune–and had become a large enough minority population to wield some political power.

OTOH Kelley Armstrong’s Otherworld books are about magical beings living alongside humans, but hiding their true natures.

Ah well, blog and learn!