Jennifer Anne Kogler, The Otherworldies

Twelve-year-old Fern McAllister is weird enough that she's the regular target of bullies at her over-strict private school, St. Gregory's. Unlike her twin brother and faithful confidante Sam, Fern is pale-eyed and unusually sensitive to sunlight: her skin can blister after just a few minutes of exposure. And it doesn't help that she talks to her dog and climbs trees to escape the other students during recess. As it turns out, Fern is stranger than even her tormenters can have imagined. Early in Jennifer Anne Kogler's The Otherworldies, Fern finds herself teleporting involuntarily out of a boring English class to a beach miles away. It's the first bizarre event in a long series of them, and the start of Fern's education into her true nature. Fern is, as the book's title suggests, an "Otherworldy"—or, as the less politically correct among us would have it, a vampire.

Readers will recognize a familiar motif in Kogler's plot: an underdog protagonist who does not quite belong in their current surroundings (think Oedipus or Paris of Troy or Harry Potter) comes to discover that he or she is heir to a kingdom or possesses extraordinary powers. The plot is appealing because we want the underdog to prevail. We are certainly rooting for Fern in the early chapters of Kogler's book, when she is at the mercy of her tween persecutors. When Fern comes more fully into her powers and the story shifts from the familiar drama of middle school to the secret halls of the Vampire Alliance Headquarters, things become less interesting and the story drags. Real human drama gives way to a litany of the strange beasties and other things that mortals are unaware exist: centaurs and cyclopes and bushes that can be used for remote eavesdropping.

In the alternative universe Kogler creates, vampires exist alongside but hidden from the mortal world. But their community is riven by a schism between good and evil branches—a fight in which Fern will have an important role to play. (Cf. the division between good wizards and Death Eaters in the Harry Potter books.) The vamps are descendants of Zeus, and Kogler weaves Greek mythology through her story to a degree. The universe of the book is interesting enough on paper, but it doesn't appeal or feel as real as, say, the Potter-verse or the world created by Joss Whedon for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It is not, that is, a place that I'm itching to get back to. But I did enjoy Kogler's story when Fern was wrestling more with her strangeness. I would that the mystery of her otherness had not been resolved quite so quickly.