I loved this book! It sandblasts away Vampire cliches.

books:

	• The Society of S: A Novel Susan Hubbard Simon & Schuster, 2007 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 38 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A captivating, well told novel

I found this book to have rich character development and enough mystery in it to keep me turning the pages. I couldn't put it down. The book puts a new spin on the usual vampire stories. The tale is delicately told about young Ari and how she comes of age realizing that she's not like other adolescents. She lives with her father. Her mother disappeared at Ari's birth. The answers to how this happened unfold in the book when Ari sets out on a quest to find her mother. Susan Hubbard has done a wonderful job in creating compelling characters. I look forward to the sequel and hopefully the movie!

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I loved this book! It sandblasts away Vampire cliches.

I love this book! Above all, this is the novel of a young person discovering the world for the first time, and I enjoyed discovering it with her.

Don't go into this vampire novel expecting a lot of fangs. Hubbard comes at vampire themes from a different direction. Every teenage girl at some point must have felt like a monster, or that members of her family were. What if it were true? This novel is a contemporary search for personal identity. Ariella Montero is a post-modern teenager who comes to suspect that her father may be a vampire;-but if he is, what does that make her? Like any contemporary teenager, she turns to the internet for answers, which of course open up new questions.

Ari's relationship with her father is at the heart of the first part of this novel, and it's a relationship that has been imagined fully and uniquely so we get the sense of sitting in someone else's living room. How would a reclusive, scientist single father homeschool his daughter? And explain the "facts of life" to her? For anyone who likes books, it is fun to listen in on Ariella and her father discussing the greats, as for instance Ariella goes from dismissing Poe to seeing depth in his writing, and then coming to believe that he himself may have been a Vampire.

After that, Hubbard sends her young protagonist south in search of her mother, who seems to have been the free spirit her father is not. On the road, Ari encounters some tough lessons about the people one meets out there, but slowly approaches the truth about herself and her parents.

Ari barely begins to glimpse the mostly hidden world of vampires before the novel ends, and the reader gets the sense that Hubbard has revealed only the tip of the iceburg. The title turns out to refer to one particular group of Vampires, but the narrative suggests that there are many others, each with their own proper moral and ethical codes for dealing with humans and other blood suckers. How well organized are these groups? What really do they do? These questions are only hinted at. There is a lot of territory available a follow up, and maybe two or three after that.

The father-daughter relationship suggests comparison to Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, and readers who enjoyed that novel will find plenty to enjoy in this one, but they are very different types of works. I came away from each chapter of Kostova's compelling novel thinking, "This writer had a really good liberal arts education!" whereas I came away from each chapter of S thinking about Ariella. The novels it reminded me of more were Octavia Butler's last novel, Fledgling, and Charlaine Harris's first Stookie Stackhouse novel, Dead until Dark. Readers who enjoyed either of those books should seek out Society of S, and vice versa.

The book begins with a charming introduction which intrigued me the first time through, but which I appreciated even more when I reread it immediately after finishing the novel.

As a whole, Susan Hubbard's Society of S sandblasts away the conventions and cliches of the vampire novel and comes up with an original coming of age story.

Fledgling
Dead Until Dark (Southern Vampire Mysteries, Bk. 1)
The Historian

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An excellent coming of age with a vamp twist

Ariella Montero thinks she's just like any other 13 year old. She is home schooled, vegetarian, limited contact with outsiders, and her main learning about life comes from her father Raphael, and his assistant Dennis. They have a housekeeper who comes in to cook - she's not that great, but she sees that Ariella needs some contact with kids around her own age. She takes Ariella to her house and she finds there is another world out there - she makes friends and brings into her life questions about her own home life - she finds her father is a vampire - and her mother, who left just after giving birth to Ariella was a mortal. Ariella may well be a vampire or a mortal - that has not been determined. Ariella leaves home in search of her mother, to find out why she left and to find answers of what Ariella is part of.
Hubbard shows us the lives of modern day vampires - while a good bite on the neck is good, the more civilized way of sustaining life is through breakthrough technology of supplements and tonics. They can eat, walk in the light (with sunscreen), and integrate themselves in the mainstream of life. There are radicals and there are folks like The Society of S, where vampires can, without conflict, be themselves and not be the subject of fear from humans.
Very heady information for a 13 year old girl discovering herself and her identity. It is a well written book that weaves you through lives of primarily Ariella, but through her family, friends, and 'wannabe vampires' role playing not knowing what that reality really is.
Will be interesting if a sequel is written where it takes Ariella and her family.
A good read.

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The Sanguinists live next door

(Author of The Cyber Miracles)
From its lyrical beginning, Hubbard's novel sweeps you from the seductive Savannah waterfront deep into the basement of a mysterious home in upstate New York. There an elegant, London-tailored vampire toils at his research while his daughter thirsts for information about the mother she never knew. After she emerges from the Saratoga mist, young Ariella Montero races through a coming-of-age journey that will entrance, shock and make you believe that sanguinists could live next door.
(Best read with a glass of Picardo and platter of raw oysters.)

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Great for Society

I picked up "The Society of S" not because of the vampire thread but, instead, because of the coming of age and personal journey themes. While I enjoy books about these latter themes, they've been done before. But by adding vampirism to the story, Hubbard has made this book one that certainly hasn't been done before. Each character offers varying and refreshing points of view; we meet adolescents and adults, both mortal and immortal. Here, the supernatural appears natural. This is a book about adaptation, assimilation, persistence, and family.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, page 7, 8

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