Alys Arden’s THE CASQUETTE GIRLS is very much a love letter to the city of New Orleans. There’s Voodoo practitioners, local legends, drinking and debauchery, and a good amount of French. But a big, yet largely unspoken factor is Hurricane Katrina (the storm in the book is unnamed.) Although the devastation wrought by the book’s storm is usually in the background, it’s always there: “I stared hard out the windshield, trying to figure out what was out of place, and then horror struck me: I was looking at a house that the Storm had moved to the opposite side of the street, as if some omnipotent giant’s finger had slid it like a toy.”
But THE CASQUETTE GIRLS is decidedly not about Hurricane Katrina or any other real-life disaster or tragedy; rather, it’s a great teenagers-battling-vampires epic in the grand tradition of Buffy and The Lost Boys. It definitely fits this mold, rather than a certain other story in which a teenager falls in love with a vampire, and vampires are actually rather cuddly, etc. Actually, THE CASQUETTE GIRLS neatly dodges being a Twilight clone while at the same time even kind of lobbing a few sly joking references in its direction.
The ending might not quite be the explosive climax the reader was hoping for, but it still delivers quite a few surprises. The ending, overall, is pretty heartbreaking, throwing the rest of the story in a somewhat different light, more than making up for the lack of violence.
In the way that it fuses the experience of adolescence, the city of New Orleans, history, magic and vampires, THE CASQUETTE GIRLS can’t help but be a fun adventure, but more than that, it’s a smart story with a surprising amount of emotional depth.
Reviewed by Charles Baker for IndieReader.