I love books about vampires & supernatural creatures, and this book deals with vampires, but it is not like the usual books popular for this. No - it is more of a weighing up of are vampires real or are they imagined? The central character - Rebecca - discusses this in her journal - a daily recording of her teenage life at an exclusive boarding school in America.

Rebecca has a best friend called Lucy - in fact you wonder if she isn't perhaps oddly obsessed with her friend Lucy - needing her like a life raft to survive and navigate the difficult passage through life at school. Ernessa joins them at school - a new girl who not only doesn't fit in, she doesn't even try - she seems wise beyond her years and she seems not to care what anyone thinks of her - our heroine would love to be like that.

The book carries literary discussions of reknowned deep thinkers, poetry, imagery - the subject matter is very erudite. The main driver however, is that our heroine beleives that her new classmate is a vampire, and she beleives that the vampire wants to drain her best friend Lucy until she dies (much like the Lucy in Bram Stoker's Dracula). Rachael feels that her father (who committed suicide a few months earlier) has left her clues about how to deal with vampires and she takes matters into her own hands when 2 of her peers anda teacher die in strange and unexplained circumstances. The tale becomes charged with gothic tension and hysteria.  Can Rachael bring an end to it all? can she save Lucy's immortal soul? Is this really happening, or is it a figment of her slightly lustful and fearful teenage perception of events?

Goths and teenagers everywhere are going to love this!! I enjoyed it too, I could hardly put it down, although it was not the most cheerful read, dealing with uncomfortable topics at times.

Now it's been adapted to a major motion picture  The Moth Diaries (2011) - IMDb   I am suren Young Adults everywhere will be reading the bookand/or watching the film because they want to dig deeper.

If you liked this book you will probably also enjoy New Girl by Paige Harbison 

rebecca-books.blogspot.com/2012/08/new-girl-paige-harbison.html

& The Shiver Trilogy by Maggie Stiefvater

maggiestiefvater.com/the-shiver-trilogy/‎