Undead and Unwed: A Queen Betsy Novel (Queen Betsy, #1)

by Mary Janice Davidson

First Betsy Taylor loses her job, then she's killed in a car accident.  But what really bites is that she can't seem to stay dead.  And now her new friends have the ridiculous idea that Betsy is the prophesied vampire queen, and they want her help in overthrowing the most obnoxious power-hungry vampire in five centuries.

• ISBN10: 042519485X
• ISBN13: 9780425194850
• Publish Date: 2 March 2004
• Publish Status: Out of Stock
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Penguin Putnam Inc
• Imprint: Berkley Publishing Corporation,U.S.
• Format: Paperback (US Mass Market)
• Pages: 288
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780425194850

Reviews

[booksandcats]

It's a fun take at a vampire story, but Betsy's character get's annoying and kind of dull midway through the story.

[EBookObsessed]

This was a fun, light-hearted urban fantasy series. Betsy is a good person but a bit shallow. She is more concerned with her footwear than her special status of Queen of the Vampires. The ridiculousness of it all makes it a fun read.

Elizabeth “Betsy” Taylor is having the worst week of her life. First, she gets fired from her crappy job. Then, she gets hit by a car trying to save her cat. Worse yet, Betsy wakes up in a coffin wearing an awful pink suit, bad makeup and knock off, cheap shoes. Cheap shoes!! With a closet full of designer footwear, someone is trying to send her off to her eternal rest in cheap, department store shoes! It has to be her stepmother.

Alright, even with indignity of wearing cheap shoes, Betsy has to acknowledge that she was dead, so why is she suddenly walking around. At first she believes that she must be a zombie and Betsy spends the rest of the night trying to return to her untimely death, but she just can’t seem to kill herself again. Something definitely is not right here.

Once she realizes that she is, in fact, a vampire and not a zombie. She is rather annoyed to find that none of the stereotypical vampire legends all true. She has no problem with sunlight. She could gargle with holy water if she wanted. Crosses, no problem. But blood drinking? Ewww. Not a fan. That might just be a deal killer in the whole dead/undead thing.

She also has two vampires chasing her around. Hotty, McHot Eric Sinclair wants to teach her all about being a vampire. The only thing is his ego takes up all the air in a room. Good thing vampires don’t breathe. There is also creepy Nostro…No Doze…Nose Bleed…whatever his name is who insists that Betsy kneel to his greatness. As if! So he can stop sending out his goons who keep trying to grab her and drag her back to his crypt. Oh, yeah. This loser has a crypt and a tuxedo and every other B-movie Dracula prop.

What Betsy hasn’t realized is that she is special and her rising has been prophesized. A Queen would rise and gather the vampires together. A Queen who could walk in sunlight and who wasn’t damned by God. And who apparently has excellent taste in shoes.

The question is whether or not Betsy wants to be Queen of the Undead or just go shopping.

THOUGHTS:
I think the narrator, Nancy Wu, did a wonderful job bringing Betsy to life. She is flighty and shallow, but in a fun way rather than a shallow bimbo. She takes a stand when needed, but really isn’t interested in vampire politics and simply wants to get on with her life or unlife or whatever. I wasn’t as excited about her presentation of Sinclair and I am not sure if that was her choice of voice or the writing. He is to be the love interest, but he comes off stuffy rather than sexy. Let’s see if Betsy can get him to lighten up as the series goes on.

All of the characters seem to fall into a stereotypical, sitcom characterization but that seems to be part of the fun. Betsy’s best friend, Jessica is an young black woman who is always looking for racial offense, but she is uber-rich. As an example, Jessica is offend by Betsy’s love for Gone with the Wind and they debate the characters and while Jessica is discussion the oppression of black people, Betsy points out that that when they met in high school, Jessica had a designer handbag that cost more than Betsy made last year and that Jess’s “people” aren't oppressed. Betsy makes friends with a gay man who is openly gay and proud of it. She also has a step-mother who she doesn’t get along with. She is a gold digger and stole her father from her mother. Even the vampires are all stereotypical: The sexy, suave Sinclair and the evil, power hungry Nostro and his minions. It is all written in fun and makes you laugh.

My one criticism here is that sometimes in world building a new series, authors paint themselves into a corner. Maybe it was an attempt to be sexy but author MaryJanice Davidson has made it a requirement that if you take blood from someone, you need to “give back” to the donor by way of sexual relations. This explains why Betsy watches Sinclair in bed with three women as he has sex and feeds, and why the first person Betsy feeds from ends up in almost a zombie state knowing nothing but his need to have sex with Betsy. Sinclair explains that not satisfying the lust of the donor will cause mental problems with the donor and an obsession with the vampire. He tells her that like him she needs to keep a harem of donors so she doesn’t have to go around having sex with every stranger she bites.

Betsy isn’t exactly a prude but she has no interest in this and when setting up Sinclair for a future love interest, it is hard for the reader to enjoy a future romance when you know that they both will need to have relations with other people, let alone a group, in order to eat. While Sinclair needs to feed often, Betsy, as the special queen, doesn’t need to feed often so we haven’t dealt with this issue too much as yet, but eventually, we will need to deal with an obsessive crowd of vampire snacks or Betsy will need to have a harem for food and casual sex. It doesn’t work well for this series and now that it has been stated and out there what do we do with it? We can get around it with Betsy being special, but will she be okay with Sinclair having to have an orgy every day for dinner?

With fifteen stories in the series so far, we will certainly be able to see how that all works out. I have a copy of Book 2, Undead and Unemployed, and hopefully I will be able to get to that soon.

If you like your paranormal stories on the light side, you might want to give Undead and Unwed a try.

[tellemonstar]

I really liked it. Besty is just gorgeous and Sinclair is just what you'd expect from a guy like him.

[inlibrisveritas]

This is a fairly quick paced and witty read. The main character Elizabeth Taylor, or as she likes to be called Betsy, is an attractive, talkative, shoe nut who has had a really weird and in her opinion horrible week. First she gets laid off of her crummy job, then she dies...but to matters worse for her she doesn't stay dead and now she's all mixed up in vampire politics and wants nothing more than to go back to her normal life.

The first thing you must remember about this book is that it's all about the main character, so the plot is really quick but the dialogue is pretty much key. Since it's all about...Betsy...she talks...alot, granted she has some witty comebacks sometimes but other times she is simply spewing words. She's a sort of 'in your face' kind of person and she'll say what she is thinking no matter what it is, so some comes off as childish but that is her personality. The other main characters are interesting in their own way but they don't really get brought into the lime light unless Betsy puts them there.

This is meant to be a quick paced and fun read, and to be honest it is. I don't usually read books like this so at first I was a little unsure if I liked how it was written or not, but by the time I hit chapter 5 I was ready to read more and finished the book quickly. It doesn't call for any thought on the readers part at all since pretty much everything is laid out for you, and while that would make other books suck to high heaven this one doesn't. Since it's not all about the plot really and more about how Betsy is dealing with it you never really loose interest in what all is going to happen.However I would never want to meet Betsy...god she can be annoying. Even I was telling her to shut up at times. She also can be seriously shallow when it comes down to it, which is annoying but her character.

[ibeforem]

This book is a mix of paranormal and chick lit, so if you don’t like either genre you need to avoid it like a vampire avoids garlic. Oops, sorry about the slip into lame similes. I thought this was pretty good. It was cute, almost precious at points, but I liked Betsy’s no-nonsense reaction to waking up and discovering that she’s now undead. My one complaint is that I found the language to be rather crude at at times. I’m no prude, but the sudden switch to almost vulgarity during the sex/feeding scenes was rather jarring. But it was a fun diversion and the reader of the audiobook was a perfect fit, so I’ll definitely be listening to more in the series.