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Series Review - Teeth: The Complete Meal by Chele Cooke

Greetings and welcome to Reviews That Burn: Series Reviews, part of Books That Burn. Series Reviews discuss at least three books in a series and cover the overarching themes and development of the story across several books. I'd like to thank longtime Patron Case Aiken, who receives a monthly shoutout, as well as returning patron Chris Alvarado. Full Audio Here   Teeth: The Complete Meal by Chele Cooke TEETH: The First Bite Being dead just got complicated.   Spencer’s life began after his death. Being a vampire is better than any teen flick made it out to be. After all, what’s not to like? He’s stronger, faster, and deadlier than any predator. He has a job, a home, and he’ll be young and pretty forever. When Thomas wakes up in the throes of transitioning, Spencer is assigned to train the newly sired vampire. He thinks it’ll be fun, but it could turn the afterlife upside down for everyone, even the people Spencer didn’t know existed. Spencer is about to learn that the rules he ...

Blood of Elves - Andrzej Sapkowski (The Witcher, #1)

Blood of Elves is methodical and languid, slowly building the picture of a dark world torn by war. I enjoyed this one, I completely see how it spawned a game series if the rest of the series is like this first book. 

It has a feel of a world already in progress that doesn't really have the time to pause and catch you up on what's happening right away, but it balances this by giving just a few key events or people at a time. The exposition comes in the middle or end of various sequences rather than at the start, and it creates a feeling that you can just relax and not worry about all the picky details for a minute. We have a few obvious protagonists and then kind of a sea of shifting loyalties and petty players in some larger game that we'll hopefully understand more as the series progresses.

Overall I liked it and I'm going to keep reading these, but part of that is because I want to see where it goes, rather than there being anything particularly gripping or amazing in this book. Geralt's dynamic with Ciri is brusque but nice, and I'm looking forward to more of them.

There's a lot of frank discussion of sexuality, specifically sexual expectations and stereotypes for women and girls. I think this is balanced by the generally sex-positive angle of the series so far, but I'll be paying attention to this topic as I continue reading the series. It's a little too early for me to tell whether it's heading somewhere creepy, but so far it's good.

CW for sexism, violence, death.

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