Review: Peeps

Title: Peeps

Author: Scott Westerfeld

Rating: 4.5 stars

The Blurb:

A year ago, Cal Thompson was a college freshman more interested in meeting girls and partying than in attending biology class. Now, after a fateful encounter with a mysterious woman named Morgan, biology has become, literally, Cal's life.

Cal was infected by a parasite that has a truly horrifying effect on its host. Cal himself is a carrier, unchanged by the parasite, but he's infected the girlfriends he's had since Morgan. All three have turned into the ravening ghouls Cal calls Peeps. The rest of us know them as vampires. It's Cal's job to hunt them down before they can create more of their kind. . . .

Review:
This book was really cool. It sort of reminded me of a Michael Crichton book (which in my opinion is a huge compliment) because it had a lot of information about different parasites and I felt like I was being educated as well as entertained. At times learning about the parasites was kind of creepy, but the interesting aspects of it really outweighed the creep factor. It actually made me want to research parasites a bit.

I liked the new twist on the vampire mythology. It was really interesting reading about how the vampire myths got started and how people thought it was all magic and the devils work when in actuality it all happened because of a parasite that had evolved over many years. I always love it when instead of magic, science is used to explain things. I especially liked it because it felt like something that could conceivably happen.

The main character Cal Thompson was somewhat forgettable. He was nice and I liked him but he didn't really seem to have too many flaws (other than the fact that he is a carrier of "vampirism") and I really prefer my main characters to have some flaws in them. His story of how he became a carrier of vampirism was interesting though.

I really like the other main character character in this book. Her name is Lace and she is a journalism student so I thought that was pretty cool (as a journalism student myself I can relate to her). I like how tenacious and brave she is. I do have one huge problem with her though,  Lace says "dude" way too much. I seriously wanted to smack her every time she said it (a possible overreaction but that really can't be helped), but other than that I did really like her character.

This book was a lot of fun to read; it has science, a slight romance, some detective work, and some action. I'm really glad that I picked this book up. Although while I did enjoy the book I felt like everything got tied up a bit too neatly at the end.

Scott Westerfeld is a great writer and I'm really looking forward to reading other books by him. I would recommend this book to pretty much anyone because it has a lot of appeal and I think that most people would enjoy reading it.