- Five copes of Drain You, signed by author M. Beth Bloom
- A $50 credit at Wasteland, the favorite store of Quinn (Drain You‘s main character)
- Pages from Quinn’s notebook
- Ten Drain You bookmarks, handmade by Quinn
- Ten ’90s mixtapes, curated and created by Quinn
Drain You is the story of a California teen who comes across a community of vampires: Summer. The ’90s. The rich, sun-bleached neighborhoods of the Los Angeles canyons. Enter Quinlan Lacey, a cool, bored, sarcastic, sexy 17-year-old with a dull part-time video store job and a mild case of teen ennui. That is, until she meets the alluring, River Phoenix-esque James, and realizes the hills are alive with the undead. Inspired more by the early, dry L. A. short stories of Bret Easton Ellis than the current crop of serialized vampire fiction, the supernatural grunge romance, Drain You, narrates the headaches and heartbreaks Quinn undergoes in her quest to stay sane and cool and in love and alive.
I gave the book 4 out of 5 cupcakes (my review was originally published here), primarily because Quinn is so realistic and likable. I admit to finding parts of the book repetitive, but I could not stop reading it. And that is the sign of a book book, non?
About the author: Bloom’s first short story “Love And Other Catastrophes: A Mix Tape” was featured in Story Quarterly and selected by Dave Eggers for inclusion in The Best American Nonrequired Reading: 2003 (Houghton-Mifflin), which he curates annually. Bloom is the founder of underground dance label 100% Silk (profiled here in LA Weekly) AND the producer/lead singer of the band LA Vampires (written up in The Guardian as well as Pitchfork and Fader). Her next book will be published through HarperTeen.
M. Beth lives on the east side of L.A. where she indulges in raw fooding, magazine subscribing, thrift shopping, Sunday matinee’ing, and ladies book clubbing.
cupcake's book cupboard 