Customer Reviews

The Society of S: A Novel

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Susan Hubbard is already an award-winning short story writer, but the Society of S is my first encounter with her work. It won't be my last, though. I absolutely love this book.

Ariella Montero is an atypical 13 YO girl who desperately wants to find the secret behind her mother's disappearance immediately after her birth. Ariella is homeschooled by her impossibly handsome and equally mysterious father, who works as a scientist in the basement when he isn't schooling his daughter in literature, history, science and philosophy. When dad isn't teaching or experimenting, he sits quietly and peacefully in his conservatory reading Edgar Allan Poe and drinking Picardo.

Susan Hubbard has created a completely believable and empathetic cast of characters, characters that I hope to see much more of in the future. For anyone who loves literary mystery, vampire tales, inventive writing and a great story, this book is an absolute must read. Hubbard's experience as a short story writer has taught her how to pace her novel. Having suffered through a few over-rated and long-winded reads this year only to finish them feeling cheated, I can say for certain that there is a great deal to be said for a writer who knows how to set up a story and actually deliver the goods throughout the book at certain points.

You will not be disappointed in the time it takes to polish off this atmospheric 300-page wonder. A good story that is well told, well paced, exciting, interesting...I can't say enough good things about this book. Don't miss the Society of S.

In a surprising deviation from conventional vampire lore, Susan Hubbard has created a coming of age novel that is elegantly written and lingers long after the last page has turned. But if readers are expecting the typical tale of lusty vampires mired in melancholia, then the unraveling journey of young Ariella Montero might prove a bit tame.

The Society of S evolves meticulously to chronicle the quest of 13-year-old Ariella who endeavors to solve the mystery surrounding the disappearance of her mother. But every clue brings her closer to discovering her own true nature-an identity that her father has strangely suppressed.

Issues begin to plague her beyond normal teenage angst-why is her mirror image always skewed? Why can't her father be photographed? Why is she always anemic? Who is watching her in the shadows? What is going on in the basement with her father's research with Seradrone? Something is churning in the depths of her that she doesn't recognize-something not entirely human. And it wants out.

As these permutations unveil in their gloomy Saratoga Springs manse, her research scientist father observes the ultimate experiment in his daughter, with a curious detached fascination-determined that nature take its course without interference. Has he begat a predator, a distinctive "other", or an ordinary mortal?

Hubbard cautiously skirts around the issue, as if not ready to let go of the secret of Ariella and her father. There is no exclamatory "a ha!" once the secret is revealed. Strangely devoid of the passion that makes vampire mythology so enticing, Hubbard engages in subtlety. There are no vampires morphing into bats, or lashing out in dramatic fights with antique Valenciennes lace at their necks.

While it may not be a "Hollywood" or "Bram Stoker" vision, or even resemble anything closely to Anne Rice, the Society of S begs to challenge the reader by analyzing what it means to be immortal through the eyes of literature. Clearly the pursuit of knowledge is the theme throughout the book and a worthy occupation for the undead.

Readers will be strangely riveted by Hubbard's take on the modern vampire, despite the apparent mundane suburban feel within the fabric of the plot. But the novel captures an indefinable something that makes it appealing as well. Worth the read to discover that the journey is just as important as the destination.Copyright(c)Nicola Mattos

Susan Hubbard's "Society of S" seamlessly combines the impeccable intellect of a free thinker with the passionate curiosity of a child and gives rise to Ariella Montero--a sheltered, but brilliant girl, home-schooled by her proper, reclusive scientist father, desperate to know about the mother who left after her birth. The voice of this 13-year-old captivated me immediately and I was soon shuddering at the sight of mutilated ghosts and laughing at the painfully old-fashioned aunt, while turning page after page to get to the bottom of her father's secret and her mother's disappearance.

The freshness of Hubbard's language and the beauty of her descriptions lends Ariella's journey a poetic quality, yet the universal nature of her search for answers and for a balance between breaking out of your shell and breaking to pieces makes (even the supernatural aspects of) this novel tangibly real and believable. This is an enchanting, memorable read, filled with secrets and scents, troubles and tastes, that just might make you want to go eat honey or oysters, and just might make you raise your glass in the company of your loved ones and say "So let us rejoice/While we are young"--regardless of your age.

Ariella Montero thinks she's just like any other 13 year old. She is home schooled, vegetarian, limited contact with outsiders, and her main learning about life comes from her father Raphael, and his assistant Dennis. They have a housekeeper who comes in to cook - she's not that great, but she sees that Ariella needs some contact with kids around her own age. She takes Ariella to her house and she finds there is another world out there - she makes friends and brings into her life questions about her own home life - she finds her father is a vampire - and her mother, who left just after giving birth to Ariella was a mortal. Ariella may well be a vampire or a mortal - that has not been determined. Ariella leaves home in search of her mother, to find out why she left and to find answers of what Ariella is part of.

Hubbard shows us the lives of modern day vampires - while a good bite on the neck is good, the more civilized way of sustaining life is through breakthrough technology of supplements and tonics. They can eat, walk in the light (with sunscreen), and integrate themselves in the mainstream of life. There are radicals and there are folks like The Society of S, where vampires can, without conflict, be themselves and not be the subject of fear from humans.

Very heady information for a 13 year old girl discovering herself and her identity. It is a well written book that weaves you through lives of primarily Ariella, but through her family, friends, and 'wannabe vampires' role playing not knowing what that reality really is.

Will be interesting if a sequel is written where it takes Ariella and her family.

A good read.

I love this book! Above all, this is the novel of a young person discovering the world for the first time, and I enjoyed discovering it with her.

Don't go into this vampire novel expecting a lot of fangs. Hubbard comes at vampire themes from a different direction. Every teenage girl at some point must have felt like a monster, or that members of her family were. What if it were true? This novel is a contemporary search for personal identity. Ariella Montero is a post-modern teenager who comes to suspect that her father may be a vampire;-but if he is, what does that make her? Like any contemporary teenager, she turns to the internet for answers, which of course open up new questions.

Ari's relationship with her father is at the heart of the first part of this novel, and it's a relationship that has been imagined fully and uniquely so we get the sense of sitting in someone else's living room. How would a reclusive, scientist single father homeschool his daughter? And explain the "facts of life" to her? For anyone who likes books, it is fun to listen in on Ariella and her father discussing the greats, as for instance Ariella goes from dismissing Poe to seeing depth in his writing, and then coming to believe that he himself may have been a Vampire.

After that, Hubbard sends her young protagonist south in search of her mother, who seems to have been the free spirit her father is not. On the road, Ari encounters some tough lessons about the people one meets out there, but slowly approaches the truth about herself and her parents.

Ari barely begins to glimpse the mostly hidden world of vampires before the novel ends, and the reader gets the sense that Hubbard has revealed only the tip of the iceburg. The title turns out to refer to one particular group of Vampires, but the narrative suggests that there are many others, each with their own proper moral and ethical codes for dealing with humans and other blood suckers. How well organized are these groups? What really do they do? These questions are only hinted at. There is a lot of territory available a follow up, and maybe two or three after that.

The father-daughter relationship suggests comparison to Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, and readers who enjoyed that novel will find plenty to enjoy in this one, but they are very different types of works. I came away from each chapter of Kostova's compelling novel thinking, "This writer had a really good liberal arts education!" whereas I came away from each chapter of S thinking about Ariella. The novels it reminded me of more were Octavia Butler's last novel, Fledgling, and Charlaine Harris's first Stookie Stackhouse novel, Dead until Dark. Readers who enjoyed either of those books should seek out Society of S, and vice versa.

The book begins with a charming introduction which intrigued me the first time through, but which I appreciated even more when I reread it immediately after finishing the novel.

As a whole, Susan Hubbard's Society of S sandblasts away the conventions and cliches of the vampire novel and comes up with an original coming of age story.

Fledgling

Dead Until Dark (Southern Vampire Mysteries, Bk. 1)

The Historian

I found this book to have rich character development and enough mystery in it to keep me turning the pages. I couldn't put it down. The book puts a new spin on the usual vampire stories. The tale is delicately told about young Ari and how she comes of age realizing that she's not like other adolescents. She lives with her father. Her mother disappeared at Ari's birth. The answers to how this happened unfold in the book when Ari sets out on a quest to find her mother. Susan Hubbard has done a wonderful job in creating compelling characters. I look forward to the sequel and hopefully the movie!

I'm a fan of literary novels, as well as some vampire stories. After a glowing recommendation from a friend, I picked up "The Society of S." I hoped for something less bloated than "The Historian" and equally mysterious as "Dracula," but with its own take on the legend.

Set in the present, the book is told from the point of view of young Ariella, whose mother has been missing all her life, and whose father seems shrouded in mystery. We follow Ari as a young teen, a erudite child with a love for philosophy and history, who doesn't even own a TV. She does move in the circles of our modern times, and yet she has a timelessness about her that matches the eventual unveiling as her part of a vampire family. Even the language she uses matches a different time period. With teen daughters of my own, I found it hard to believe she was a person from this generation.

Hubbard writes with grace and confidence. She creates some wonderfully memorable characters, while others act only as caricatures. I was drawn into the troubles of young Ari, but Ari's personality and the voice of the writing have a strangely disconnected feeling. This may be intentional, to match the themes of the novel, but they left me lukewarm in my interest.

As a literary story, this could've gone deeper; as a vampire story, it lacked much in the way of intrigue or danger. Overall, my desire to like the book was watered down by the story's split-personality. At times, I would've believed I was reading a novel from a hundred years ago, and at others I was expected to buy into modern concerns. This constant tug-and-pull left me stretched thin. While I would certainly read more of Hubbard's writing, I think she would do best with a historical take on this well-worn theme.

(Author of The Cyber Miracles)
From its lyrical beginning, Hubbard's novel sweeps you from the seductive Savannah waterfront deep into the basement of a mysterious home in upstate New York. There an elegant, London-tailored vampire toils at his research while his daughter thirsts for information about the mother she never knew. After she emerges from the Saratoga mist, young Ariella Montero races through a coming-of-age journey that will entrance, shock and make you believe that sanguinists could live next door.
(Best read with a glass of Picardo and platter of raw oysters.)

I bought "The Society of S: A Novel" on Saturday night, and I finished it this morning. What a ride! This novel is wonderful. The voice of the narrator/protagonist, Ariella Montero, is compelling. Her humor, wisdom, and grief are truly moving, as are her victories and losses. Hubbard creates an absolutely lush world for Ari to live in and travel through. I felt like I could not just see, but feel and smell the settings being described. I've been a vegetarian for eleven years and it made me want to eat oysters. I can't wait to see the movie.

The Society of S is, in part, the coming of age story of Ariella Montero, an intellectual young adult going through puberty and trying to find her place in her world and the world at large. Ari lives with her father, and he keeps her largely sheltered from the outside world, claiming her fragility and a danger of inheriting his lupus as a justification for her seclusion.

However, as Ari reaches puberty her world begins to expand and each question seems to lead to another. Though her mother disappeared within hours of Ari's birth, Ari knows things about her mother she couldn't possibly know. Her dreams contain songs, puzzles, and other clues that help prompt her quest.

Devoted to the logic she was taught as part of her father's homeschooling, Ari approaches the mysteries unfolding before her with a desire to research and put the puzzle pieces in their proper order. What she finds, though, surpasses her expectations.

The Society of S is a perfect marriage of a coming of age story with a great vampire/sci-fi thriller. The key to why this story works is the well developed characters grounded in the real world.

The descriptions are vivid, employing a vast array of sensory detail and making skillful use of synesthesia, which one usually only finds in poetry. Hubbard deftly uses telling details to develop each character, right down to the mole-hairs on Root's chiny-chin-chin. The settings also enhance the story, and the reader gains access to these settings through the eyes of a young woman new to much of the outside world.

While many vampire stories that have come before remove vampires from the real world, this book shows the struggle of a race trying to fit in. In The Society of S, both Ari and the race of vampires struggle in a sort of adolescence, which for vampires seems like it could go on forever.