I'm A Nice Cutesy Little Demon - Want To Make Out?

[branquignole]

I'm slowly becoming one of those useless "oh look, haven't blogged for two weeks, could do that again... later" bloggers again. The reason for this is not laziness on my part though, the reason is that my computer has probably been hacked. Poor Arnulf is sadly gazing at me with a dark screen and I'm writing from my mum's computer. We'll probably have to reinstall Arnulf, and I hope that we'll get it done today, even with all the back-ups. (The back-ups! Do you know how much there is to back up on my computer? :()

Anyway, the first week of school is past and it even was quite nice. Especially since I didn't have to get up early on any day but Thursday (lessons not taking place and the like). On the first day of school, they tried to put us in a broom closet or something and it turned out that they had written down the wrong room number on the list. Well, thank you very much. We didn't get much homework this week but they're letting us feel that we're all grown-up now by dumping all kinds of reports on us we'll have to do during the year. This week, though, I still had some time to read and I finally picked up Nybbas Träume by Jennifer Benkau; Dark Romance in German! The Nybbas Nicholas is a demon who feeds on human feelings and who has chosen quite an attractive body. The only thing he has to fear are the Clerica, demon hunters, who can only sense him when he leaves his human body though. When he meets Joana, who has lost her fiancé and her baby some years ago, and whose father mysteriously died in some cave when she was a baby herself, both he and Joana get caught up in a conflict between bad and good.

Alright, it was packed with clichés, I admit. But it was rather well written cliché. Bad boy, to be redeemed, falls in love with a girl with strange abilities. What I really liked about this relationship, though, was that there were actually reasons for him (a two-hundred and something year old demon) to fall in love with Joana because she is an actual person with an actual personality. She is of course pretty down because of her losses, but she's not that cute emo girl crying in some corner. I really liked her. She was a strong character with her own traits and not all about Nicholas, the love of her life and so on. I also have to admit that I fell for Nicholas pretty quickly, as is our custom, girls. :) He was snarky and brooding and witty and attractive. And an evil demon. What's not to love?

Strictly speaking, he's a monster. He doesn't have any qualms when it comes to feeding. Human feelings are what he lives on, and therefore he takes them. It's different with Joana once their relationship evolves, and that was convincingly done by the author. Especially since Nicholas tells her at some point that he won't make any exceptions for her friends and wants to know on which ground he'd make them, whether her friends are better people just because they're her friends etc. I loved that conversation because it showed that he's not the sweet little monster who is unfortunately forced to this lifestyle. He says that he doesn't understand morals but from what he says and does, it's pretty clear that he has a rather good grasp on them - he just applies them differently.

I think Nybbas Träume was the first Dark Romance I read. There were of course loads of smut, but it was well written smut and the author knew exactly where to draw the line so it wouldn't be too much. Sometimes, I thought the writing style was not all that polished yet, but all in all it was really good. The only thing I didn't really like was the ending, which was just a little too convenient in my eyes, and I think that this book doesn't really need a sequel. I'm going to read it anyway of course. There are seldom German authors I feel I want to support, and if I find one, like Jennifer Benkau, it makes me very happy.