"great vampire romance"

In spite of attending "Fabulous University", an Ivy League school, Milagro de Los Santos has not been able to find steady work since she graduated and her string of loser boyfriends would be the support characters of beach novels. Her friend Nancy turns Milagro into a "reading consultant", which led to four degrees of connection to writer Sebastian Beckett-Witherspoon, who was one of her beach buddies at F.U. At the soiree Milagro meets Oswaldo Krakatoa as both hate Witherspoon's pretentious book. Later at the Croft Hotel where he is staying, he bites Milagro in the neck.

Not long after that a bewildered Milagro is kidnapped by Sebastian only to be rescued by Oswaldo, who takes her to the safety of his family at their ranch. Milagro finds her new friends warm though strange, but is upset that her new boyfriend Oswaldo has a fiancée. However, as she knows she must return to her rat infested apartment, Milagro concludes that the only way she and the man make that male she loves to be together forever, is for her to Bridge the gap of "I Love the Night Life" at Casa Dracula.

Marta Acosta has written one of the best vampire romances in several years as she refreshes the sub-genre theme with terrific twists that keep the audience on edge wanting to learn more about the attendees at HAPPY HOUR AT CASA DRACULA. . Milagro is a superb protagonist with her amusing chick lit asides that will remind the audience of Love at First Bite with her as Susan Saint James' Cindy Sondheim and Oswaldo as George Hamilton's Count Vladimir Dracula. The fast-paced story line never slows down until the final bite occurs

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted June 20, 2006

Vampires. Margaritas. Mayhem. What's a girl to do when she's hidden away at the home of sophisticated vampires and her exboyfriend wants to drive a stake through her heart?

Summary

HAPPY HOUR AT CASA DRACULA is a comic novel about a young woman who desperately yearns to be taken seriously as a writer, a human being, and a girlfriend. Latina Ivy League grad Milagro de Los Santos can't find her place in the world or a man to go with it. All the men she meets are like beach reads -- fun, but superficial -- and she worries that she is only a beach read, too. Then one night, at a book party for her pretentious ex-boyfriend, she meets an oddly attractive man. After she is bitten while kissing him, she falls ill and is squirreled away to his family's estate to recover. Vampires don't exist in this day and age, or do they? As Milagro falls in love with a fabulously inappropriate man, she finds herself caught between a family who has accepted her as one of their own and a shady organization that refuses to let the undead live and love in peace.