"Circus of the Darned" is a young adult paranormal romance book by author Katie MacAlister, writing under the pseudonym Katie Maxwell. It is a comedy romance about a 16 year old girl who is a palm reader in a travelling circus and who is engaged to a vampire.
As I have probably mentioned too many times, I have a big supply of "light reading", and I am constantly telling myself I will open up something nice and predictable, shut my brain off, and enjoy it. And I usually fail. This book failed at first, and then became entertaining enough that I actually wanted to find out how it ended. Fran is a typical teenage girl---no wait, Fran is an atypical teenage girl. She lives in a travelling circus, with her mother who practices wicca, and is engaged to a vampire named Benedikt who is a few hundred years old, and is best friends with her fiance's sister, Imogen. And she has a horse, named Tesla.
Which I could all be making up because the chances are that no one reading this is going to go out and find a copy of this book that I found at a used book store's going out of business sale at a deep discount to confirm that I am not making this all up.
The plot of this book consists of two things: her horse is stolen, and she accidentally summons a band of viking ghosts. The book's 180 pages are mostly taken up with her trying to find her horse, and deal with a group of "fish out of water" Viking ghosts who do wacky things like eat fast food. But a lot of the book is taken up with her feelings for her hunky, hundreds of years old vampire boyfriend, who she fights with because he is possessive of her, which she also finds endearing. (BTW, this book was releaed a year or two before Twilight).
Anyway, like I said: I ended up enjoying this enough as light reading, when I really needed to get my mind off of things. But the difficult part of this book for me was how it managed to hit an Uncanny Valley when depicting adolescent life. It was trying to be a lightly comedic book about a plucky goth heroine, but we also have a scene, where, while psychically connected to her hot vampire boyfriend, he soaps himself up, including his vampire penis. So we have a 16 year old girl psychically feeling a centuries old vampire penis. There are books that could deal seriously with the issue of adolescent sexuality. And there are books that could be light-hearted romps where Nordic gods show up for witty dialog. But...switching between the two of them seemed kind of clumsy. Related to this, as is often (or always) the case in tales with hot vampire boyfriends, the vampire part has been softened to the point where we mostly have to be informed that he is a vampire, which apparently consists of sleeping during the day.
I get that I am not the target audience, and that I am reading this thing 15 years too late, but it tries to be both a relevant tale of modern teenagerhood, and a silly fantasy book where a 16 year old girl gets a magical boyfriend and a horse...and it doesn't succeed at seeming real about either of those. It did, however, entertain me on a miserable afternoon, so I will give it credit for that.