Review: Team Human – Justine Larbalestier and Sarah Rees Brennan

Team Human is the story of a little town where vampires and humans co-exist in an uneasy kind of peace. There are also some zombies. Mel never really thought much about the vampires until one showed up in her school, and her best friend Cathy really liked his old world ways that were so much closer to her own ways than those of the 20th century.

I really liked Cathy, even if we didn’t get to know her all that well, since everything that happened was seen through Mel’s eyes. However, Cathy seemed like a serious, old soul who would rather have lived in the 18th century as a noble than in 2012 being a teenager having to attend high school. I could completely understand her attraction to Francis, and maybe that is what made it so hard to listen to Mel’s outbursts.

Ty was funny, but also not a character the readers got to know very well. The end, where Ty had started dating Jon seemed to have just been thrown in there to show that the book is cool enough to have gay characters, there was no building up to it, or showing that Ty might be interested in both boys and girls before that happened, and it was over within two sentences – like it had to be mentioned.

The same with Kristin, Mel’s sister, whom we only met through a few phone conversations, one of which she pointed out how girls always wanted to have sex with her. Which is fine, but again, it would have been nice to know more about Kristin than the fact that she’s Mel’s sister, she’s studying design, and she likes women. I love that more YA books are having gay or bi-sexual characters, but I think it would seem more credible if those characters were a little more fleshed out, not only in the background as if the story had to have at least one gay or bi-sexual (or in this case two) characters.

The whole mystery with Dr. Saunders was not very difficult to guess, and I thought it was strange that the vampire police didn’t figure it out earlier. I did feel a bit sorry for Anna though. But only a bit – again, I felt quite detached from the character, because Mel had so many things going on she wanted to share with us it was not easy to get to know any of the characters in depth. Even Mel is not easy to coin, she is a senior in high-school, she picks all the same classes as Cathy so that she doesn’t have to figure anything out for herself, and she likes to figure out her friends’ lives.

Mel seems to be the kind of girl who loves to tell people what they should or shouldn’t do, but at the same time, she makes no real decisions in her own life.

I might very well read the second book, because it wasn’t horrible, but it didn’t catch me and immerse me into the world as I had hoped it would. The vampires were living in their own part of town, and hardly interacted with humans at all – just like any other YA vampire book out there, the vamps are acting nice, not killing anyone, and only people who ask for it (and not all of them are accepted) can be transformed.

There was a lot of secondary drama, but not really anything meaty enough to really get my teeth into. Mel continues to annoy me a little when I think of her now, and the only character that really made sense was Cathy.

So even if this is supposed to be a parody of vampire books, I think it could have had a little more. It almost would make more sense if it was a parody of everything YA, insert non-white character, meddling best friend MC, one gay, one bi-sexual character, vampires, and parents who are not all that attentive, assertive or authoritative and then you got it. For me, the characters were not fleshed out enough, and the story was not flowing very well, so I was a little disappointed after all the hype surrounding Team Human before it was published.

About Linda @ (un)Conventional Bookworms

Linda is an English as foreign language teacher and has a Master's degree in English Language and Literature. She's an avid reader, blogger, compulsive one-clicker and a genre omnivore. Ever since she learnt how to read she has been seen with a book or two in her hands everywhere she goes.

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