The Silver Kiss by Annette Curtis Klause

Title:The Silver Kiss
Author: Annette Curtis Klause
Published Date: 1 August 1992
Genre: Adventure, romance, sci-fi, light humor, teen
Personal Rating: 4/5
Money's Worth: Quite worth it, except that you get a better bargain for a second-hand book.

Zoe is a 16 year old girl whose mother is dying from cancer. In addition to that her father seems to be distancing her from her mother and himself as though he wants his wife to himself exclusively. Bereft of any familial company, Zoe relies on her best friend. But she too moves away for a time and doesn't appear again in the book after the first few chapters.

Then one day, Zoe meets the enigmatic Simon who seems to understand her feelings perfectly. Drawn to him, she is soon horrified to find out that he is a vampire, and at first flees from him. Come Halloween a few days later however, Simon appears at Zoe's house to explain. He tells her that, he didn't become a vampire by choice, and that the real person that had forced the change had also killed his mother. He then dedicated his life to hunting his mother's killer and destroying him.

Zoe does take Simon once when she goes to see her mother. She asks him if he could turn her mother, but he says that it would be worse than torture. The cancer in her mother's body would destroy cells as fast as the vampire blood would heal her.

Finally, Zoe convinces Simon to let her help him find and destroy his mother's killer who has been terrorizing the streets of her home town. After completed his mission, Simon decides that he has had enough of his second life and tells Zoe that he plans to end his life and he wants Zoe to help him. When he does face the sun, instead of his leaving being painful, he goes without pain and calmly turns into a sunbeam. The sunbeam reference is connected to a poem that Zoe wrote earlier in the story.

It starts off as extremely sad, but grows to be and extremely meaningful story about a girl dealing with death. Zoe is the the girl and Simon represents death. Sometimes death can be your friend. It also represents temptation to get rid of all her troubles, Zoe takes comfort in the supernatural, namely Simon.