by Catherine Cheek
‘The Year of Disappearances’ by Susan Hubbard, treats the story of a vampire growing up among mortals with the same delicacy as you’d expect from an author talking about someone who had cancer, or was a political refugee, or had some other hardship thrust upon her.
The main character, Ariella Montero, is a half-vampire who lives in Florida with her mother, Mãe, and her mother’s friend Dashay. She’s fourteen, just moved to town, and her parents are recently separated, so she has the difficulties you might expect of any girl, even one who couldn’t read minds or make herself invisible. She’s also got difficulties specific to vampirism: she gets sunburned easily, she’s subject to vertigo, and she has to take a special tonic three times a day.
Ariella has been homeschooled most of her life by her brilliant father. She’s the kind of girl who can quote long-dead poets at length but doesn’t have any idea what to wear on a date. In one scene, another girl tells her she’s going to go stargazing with her boyfriend, and Ariella says, “It’s a good night for it…a full moon, and Mars will be rising in the east.” It’s that kind of line that made the nerd in me fall for her completely.
Her mother and Dashay are good characters too. Her mother is another vampire, beautiful and elegant and sophisticated, who’s a little new to mothering. Sometimes she’s a wise parent, for example when she lectures Ariella on the ethics of hypnotizing her friends. Other times she acts like Ariella is the parent. Dashay plays the role of an aunt, telling Ariella about Duppies and sasas and other evil spirits from Jamaica, sometimes giving advice and sometimes just living her own life. The interplay between those three flawed but endearing characters was fascinating enough to fill a whole book.
Pretty early on it became apparent that this was a sequel to ‘The Society of S’, though it’s not listed as such on the cover. Those who have read the first book will get more out of the subplot involving Ari’s father, but even though Ariella’s father doesn’t appear very often, he’s well described through Ariella’s memories and through the few scenes in which he does appear. Hubbard balances the line between telling us enough so that we’re not confused about the characters, but not so much that she rehashes the first book.
The characters are captivating even without a plot, but the book is called ‘The Year of Disappearances’ for a reason. Ariella sees a frightening man with white eyes, but she doesn’t know if he’s a real person or a vision that only she’s having. Then Ariella’s friend Mysty disappears. The police blame Mysty’s boyfriend, but the townspeople blame Ariella. This alarms Mãe and Dashay, because vampires don’t like to draw attention to themselves.
Mãe decides to send Ariella off to college. She goes to Hillhouse, a small liberal arts college with what appears to be almost no adult supervision. Ariella falls in love with a fellow student named Walker.
Then Autumn, Mysty’s friend, comes to Hillhouse for a visit. Autumn disappears too. She’s murdered, her body left in such a way that people suspect that Ariella is the cause. This is the point at which the story pulls away from Ariella and her struggle to fit in, and delves into the plot of the disappearances.
The plot didn’t resolve itself well. We learn that people all over the world are disappearing the same way that we learn what’s causing them: Ariella finds the right person and asks him. He explains everything, and also clarifies a few mysteries from the previous novel. No tension, no discovery, it’s just handed to her.
During several times in the book, Ariella flees the creepy man with the white eyes, and for the finale—she avoids him one last time. No one is brought to justice, and there’s no indication that the disappearances will stop. Also, the FBI never manage to find the missing girl that Ariella stumbles across completely by accident.
The mood of the book towards vampires shifts near the end as well. In the beginning, Ariella aches with the need to belong, and she relishes her vampirism because it connects her to her family. Later on, other vampires talk about how worthless humans are compared to vampires, and discuss whether it’s better to kill them all or arrange for them to die out. One of the characters says “vampires, unlike humans, do have free will.” Since I’m human, as are my friends and family, I don’t like reading about how mindless we are. I’m also chagrined when the human characters in the book prove them right.
For example, there’s a drug called V that turns people into mellow, happy losers. Someone spikes the punch at the college with it, and bam, all these smart, independent kids get hooked and stay hooked. No one questions it. Even Ariella, who lets her beloved Walker disappear from her life with barely a whimper, thinks that maybe she doesn’t have the right to make value judgments on whether her friends should be druggies or not.
Some of the facts about vampires don’t hold together well either. Ariella is reviled as a half-vampire, because one parent was human, yet humans get turned into vampires, so it seems that being half-vampire would be like being half-HIV positive. Also, Ariella says that vampires don’t die, and that she’s not afraid of anything. Yet, one of the plots involves a vampire dying from a relatively harmless substance, and at the climax, Ariella runs in fear from a brainless teenage girl whose only weapon is a lit cigarette.
Still, the characters and setting are crafted well enough that even a shaky plot doesn’t mar this novel badly. Anyone who’s watched X-files knows that even major plot holes aren’t enough to damn a story if you like the characters.
There was one part of the book that really bothered me. Ariella’s romances. Jesse, a boy she thinks is seventeen or eighteen, has a crush on her early on, but she rebuffs him. Fine. Then she falls for Walker, who is old enough to vote, probably between eighteen and twenty. That’s a little creepy, as she’s technically a child, but they don’t do more than kiss and he’s young too, so I was able to shrug that off.
But then she falls for an (old) vampire who’s passing as a thirty year old senator, and he asks her out on a date. She’s fourteen. Fourteen. Fourteen-year-old girls (or vampires) can have crushes on adult men, but when the adult men ask them out on dates, that’s treading in territory that even porn sites avoid. Fortunately, they don’t date, or kiss, or do anything other than dance in this book, but the last chapter hints that this is the start of a new romance that may flourish in the next book. Ariella is a wonderful character and I’d love to read more about her, but if she’s going to hook up with adult men, I hope that Ariella gets to grow up before the sequel.
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