Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

At the invitation of one of her clients, Milagro attends a book party for a former classmate and flame, Sebatian Beckett Witherspoon, who broke her heart and went on to pretentious literary success. She hated his book, but goes to the party anyway, and finds that he’s beyond furious to see her there, even though he was the one who dumped her for another girl who was more his social equal. Seems you can put the Latina in the Ivy League, but that doesn’t mean the other students won’t recognize the divide in culture and class. Milagro, because she has a backbone of steel from having grown up with a monstrous mother, seems to be aware of but largely immune to such snubs.

While at the party, she flirts with waiters, mingles a bit, and meets Oswaldo Krakatoa, with whom she has an incendiary attraction, and she follows him to his hotel room, where they make out in pre-booty-shaking fashion, which causes them to fall down, and somehow in the twister he ends up biting her. Then some funky crap begins.

Seems Milagro wakes up feeling sick as hell, and hides out at a friend’s house until she can get herself home. Then she’s kidnapped by Beckett Witherspoon, who turns out to be a member of a murderous and completely insane organization called CACA, but then rescued by a friendly waiter from the book party, who turns out to be Oswaldo’s brother.

She’s hidden away at Oswaldo’s family home so her recovery can be watched by the family, and where just about everything can be filed under “Is Not What It Seems.” First, the dude’s name is Oswald, but why he choses to tweak his identity, I couldn’t say. And why is she there? And are they actually vampires or just victims of a strange blood disorder, as they profess that they are? Then, there’s the crusty, cranky, bitchy matriarch of the family, Edna, who takes an instant dislike to Milagro. Does she belong with Oswald’s very wealthy and very elegant family? Should she leave? Should she stay? And is she now a vampire?

Obviously, I’m not giving all the answers, so if you’re looking for Miss Harriet, you know not to look here. A good number of the reviews published so far dwell on the point that this isn’t a romance; that’s fine, it’s not. It doesn’t have the structure of a romance and while there’s some great attraction between Oswald and Milagro, the challenges placed in their way serve to discredit his integrity and could easily make him seem like a disingenuous buttnoid if the reader expects noble, perfect hero.

Milagro, however, is a damn hell fascinating character. She speaks directly to the reader through asides and commentary within each situation, which was jarring at first, but then became one of the quirks of her character, like a Shakespeare character addressing the audience. Not every character does, so those that do are significant. At the beginning of the book, her manner of addressing the story and the reader can make her seem an unreliable narrator, but ultimately I recognized her written style as indicative of the fact that as a Latina trodding in the world of WASPS and the very flaky top of the upper crust, she herself did not feel entirely welcome in any situation she was in. Because she wasn’t sure if she was an observer or a participant, she steps back and forth into and out of the story.

By the end of the book, I found myself questioning whether Milagro did change, and if she grew or developed as an individual. She certainly changes, but then seems, on the surface, to change back. On one hand, she stops pushing herself to act on, and think, and write what she thinks will impress other people, and starts living solely to make herself happy. It’s as if, due to the dreadful childhood she experienced, she feels that all she deserves is to live on the fringes of security, happiness, and wealth, and that her near-bottom-dwelling apartment existence is all to which she should feel entitled. While it’s not said outright, Milagro learns to accept the possibility of her own acceptance.

Oswald, however, is a very curious hero, and his behavior is one reason you cannot read this novel expecting it to be a straight-up romance, neat with a twist. He’s not always honest, though he is charming and very self-assured, and, like Beckett Witherspoon, has a very difficult time avoiding his desire for Milagro. His redemption is questionable and his worthiness of Milagro is equally so, but at the same time, it’s difficult not to root for her happy ending with Oswald.

My problems with the story came from not being able to clearly discern what was real. Was the disease real, or was vampirism real? Was the villain real, or was it a puppet show with good looking, empty-headed people it’s front, believing that there was more support behind them than there actually was? What actually happened to Milagro’s health by the end of the book? The reason I want to call this story a fable, or perhaps an allegory, is that there seems to be a moral, or a metaphorical representation pointing to a larger subtext, but even with some serious time pondering the story, I can’t gain access to what it might be.

Further, while Acosta’s writing itself is crisp, funny, clever, and very, very sticky, in that you can’t very easily put the damn book down once you’ve started it, the story veers off the road a few times, leading me to question whether secondary characters are more important or less so than I thought, and adding to the sense of disorientation with the final and potentially greater implications of the ending. Something could be going on here, I’m not sure I get it, and I hate not getting it. Makes me feel stoopud.

Aside from the possibilities of subtext, and the questions surrounding the resolution to the story, Happy Hour at Casa Dracula is a marvelously fun book to read, and is published at just the right time. Expect to see it in a beachbag near you.