Review: Red Moon Rising by Peter Moore

3 frosted ginger cookies.

Cover Love:

It's not bad, but not super great either.

Why I Wanted to Read This:

I have a faction of readers in my school that love vampires and a faction that love werewolves.  I bought this for the latter and wanted to read it so I could effectively book talk it next fall!  Here's the synopsis from GoodReads:

Being only half-vamp in a high school like Carpathia Night makes you a whole loser. But Danny Gray manages to escape the worst of the specists at his school. Thanks to genetic treatments he had as an infant, most people assume Danny's other half is human. Which is a good thing.
Ever since the development of synthetic blood – SynHeme – vamps have become society’s elite, while wulves like his father work menial jobs and live in bad neighborhoods. Wulves are less than second class citizens; once a month they become inmates, forced to undergo their Change in dangerous government compounds.
For Danny, living with his vamp mother and going to a school with a nearly all-vamp student body, it’s best to pretend his wulf half doesn’t even exist. But lately Danny's been having some weird symptoms — fantastic night vision; a keener-than-usual sense of smell; and headaches, right around the full moon.
Even though it's easy to be in denial, it's hard to ignore evidence. There's only a month until the next full moon, and Danny's time is running out.
Peter Moore speaks to adolescents in a voice that will have them laughing, set in a world that will get them thinking.

I Kept Reading Because: It was an interesting commentary on our world.

Romance?: Yes.

What I Liked:

This book has a great new mythology to vampyres and  werewulves.  The vampyres basically rule the society while the werewulves are low class citizens.  Each month they get locked into compounds during their time of change.  But, in the compounds there are fights and some wulves don't even come out alive.  The authorities don't really care that this happens and I think this is because if they realize that the wulves are actually stronger and faster and could easily take over.  In fact, the vamps in this world don't seem that special at all.  They are good looking and really smart and heal quickly, but wulves are definitely faster and stronger.

The humans weren't around really at all so I am not sure how they fit into this world.

What I loved about this was that Danny was going through all of these changes, which are huge, but he also had to deal with normal, everyday teen angst--like falling in love with a human girl and dealing with a specist bully at school.  He also has a spoiled older sister, a full wulf father that he doesn't talk to and a step-father who tries to be way cooler than he really is.

The way wulves are treated really is upsetting.  They are looked down up on by everyone, especially the vampyres.

The book could be a stand alone or the start to a series.  Either way it was good reading!

To Sum Up:  This book has less "paranormal" to it than some werewolf/vampire books.  This is a book about our society as it is today, with the addition of vamyres and wulves.  It's a good read and one that my students enjoy.

Book from my school library.