Funny How Things Change and the Dark Side

Hi All,
I don't get much time to read so when the CWF awards nominees are announced I read them.
I actually pretended to be asleep when I heard my family calling me for dinner one night. They couldn't find me and thought I went outside to sit on own my personal Stonehenge rock! I was in the living room and I had a book to finish! I was nearing the end of Funny How Things Change by Melissa Wyatt . The story brought out several issues, one of which was ecological and environmental, mountain topping, the destruction of mountains for the sake of easier, cheaper coal mining. It brought to mind our current situation here in NE PA with the Marcellus Shale drilling. I know of families whose groundwater is now contaminated. Families need the money so they make decisions that may have negative consequences. Consequences that seventeen year old Remy comes to understand. He is faced with decisions: does he stay in his dying West Virginia town where his family settled 160 years earlier or go with his girl friend Lisa to Pennsylvania? Does he allow his father to sell the family mountain to mining company so that Remy has money to go to PA? After he meets a young artist and starts to see his town through her eyes, he makes his decision.

The other book I read non-stop was Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side by Beth Fantaskey. I have read all the Twilight books and was always left with a feeling of anxiety and annoyance. The yin and yang of Bella and Edward's relationship. Not a comfortable feeling. I had the Dark Side home for a week before I was "allowed" to read it. My 12 year old daughter Maggie claimed it as hers. She read it twice I read it once. I really enjoyed this book. It was a fun read with all the teenage angst and hormones, human and vampire. Lucius is Jessica's Henry Higgins. Can he transform Jessica from a Pa farm girl who mucks out stalls to a Romanian vampire princess? Maggie and I thought Lucius' letters to his uncle in Roumania were well written and funny in a sarcastic way. A royal vampire's impressions of teenage life in rural PA. Maggie took the book back for a third read and now wants her own copy. Maggie also wondered if Beth's last name was her real name. It looks so much like "fantasy".
Good reads!
Laureen