A Taste for Red

A sixth-grade Goth girl who thinks she's a vampire encounters her greatest nemesis when she enrolls at Sunny Hill Middle School in this hilarious and entirely original take on the vampire genre for middle graders. Svetlana Grimm has recently discovered she's a vampire. The clues are all there: she can eat only red foods, has to sleep under the bed because of her heightened sensitivity to light and noise, and can read others' thoughts. But this new discovery is making her transition from home-schooling to attending sixth grade at Sunny Hill Middle School that much more difficult. After all, what can she possibly have in common with those jellybean-eaters in her class? She prefers to watch them from afar in her hidden lair atop the Oak of Doom in her backyard. But things get more interesting when Svetlana's cruel yet beautiful science teacher, Ms. Larch, reads her thoughts. Svetlana is excited to have found another of her kinduntil her new neighbor, The Bone Lady, fills her in on Ms. Larch's true identity and her own. What happens when your sixth-grade science teacher might also be your immortal enemy?

I haven't always been a vampire-or at least I don't think so. It was only after we moved to Sunny Hill that I first began to realize it, that I began to change. Do you prefer to sleep under your bed? You might be a vampire, too. I've read that vampires sleep in coffins. Do you think it's true? Are you a fool? Have you ever seen a coffin? They are extremely narrow-with a lid that closes down right over your face! Ridiculous! Do you like to roll over in your sleep? Well, so do I. The last thing I want is to wake up in the middle of the night and find that I can't roll over because I'm stuck in a silly coffin. What if I got a cramp? And not only that, anyone who saw the coffin would instantly know that I was a vampire-so how smart would that be? And can you imagine how freaked out my parents would be if I had a coffin in my room? It's ludicrous.