Reviewed by LadyJay for TeensReadToo.com

Angels are everywhere, especially those who guard human beings.

Zachary is Miranda's guardian angel, or GA within the heavenly realm. He has watched and protected Miranda since she was a child. He is forbidden from revealing his heavenly presence to Miranda, but can secretly guide, suggest, and influence the course of her life.

Zach thought he was doing a great job, until Miranda falls into the hands of an eternal - or vampire, as they are more commonly known. Zachary is immediately stripped of his wings and powers, and is forced to find redemption on terra firma.

Zach may not have been able to save Miranda from a vampire, but there may be a chance of saving her soul from eternal damnation.

ETERNAL was an excellent read! I enjoyed how Cynthia Leitich Smith alternated the narrative between Zachary and Miranda. It was refreshing to see and hear the perspectives of both characters. Smith has also cleverly woven bits of Stoker's Dracula, Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet into the plot. As an English teacher, it thrills me to see contemporary authors alluding to classic pieces of literature.

This novel is definitely a page-turner. It is filled with danger, deception, humor, love, sadness, and hope. I think that I was most surprised with the ending. Readers, including myself, will be saddened by what happens between Zachary and Miranda, but Smith also leaves us with a glimmer of hope.

That idea of hope is what will bring readers back again and again to Smith's work. ( )

One thing about vampires...every author makes them different. This book includes an angel and vampires and they aren't like the angels and vampires I usually imagine. This story is dark and the vampires are nasty creatures! Very intriguing reading. ( )

A YA love story between a Chinese-American vampire and her former not-quite-fallen guardian angel. It has a lot of great one-liners, and it strikes a good balance between dark, funny, and a little sexy, though I don't know if all the characterization is sufficiently motivated.

But, here's the thing. Last week, one of my teenage library patrons, a really bright black girl who's a voracious reader of vampire books, handed me 30 pages that she'd written of L.J. Smith pastiche. And all the characters were very very pale white, except for the one who was Japanese and in training to be a ninja, and my heart broke a little. (And I might not have been paying attention, if it weren't for [info]deepad's posts and [info]yhlee's posts and the others...) And I don't really know her well enough to strike up a conversation on why vampires always have to be pale white, but I was glad that I could hand her a book with a vampire of color (not a vampire symbolically standing in for people of color!) by an author of color (Smith is Creek).

Eternal is apparently set in the same world as Smith's previous novel, Tantalize, but since I haven't read that one, i can't comment on the setting. Eternal is not a sequel however, and works perfectly on its own.
Having said that - I enjoyed the book, but would perhaps have enjoyed it more had I not been flooded with vampire novels recently.
I did enjoy the dual perspective provided by the voices of Melissa, the teen turned vampire princess, and Zachary, the fallen, but still determined to save Melissa, guardian angel. I found the ending a bit too convenient, and I found Melissa's character made the decisions she made so quickly in the end of the book that they were hard to believe. There were other things that prevented me from ranking the book higher, but I don't want to give anything away, so I'll leave it at that. ( )

Did you read TANTALIZE and love it? Maybe you haven’t even heard of it. Either way it doesn’t matter. ETERNAL is set in the same world as TANTALIZE, but takes place earlier in the timeline. Completely different characters grace the pages of ETERNAL that you will grow to love. Reading TANTALIZE first isn’t necessary, so in February when ETERNAL hits the shelves run to the bookstore and get your copy.Miranda is a quiet and shy typical teenage girl. Zachary is her Guardian Angel (GA).Miranda has no idea Zachary exists.Over the years of keeping watch over Miranda, Zachary has fallen in love with her.Their status quo interaction completely changes one night in a creepy cemetery. Miranda’s best friend Lucy drags her to the cemetery to meet some guys for an exciting night out. Miranda doesn’t want to be there in the first place and lags behind until she is lost. As Zachary watches Miranda stumble through the darkness, he sees she is about to step into an abandoned open grave. Knowing she’ll probably fall and break her neck, Zachary does the first thing that comes to mind in order to save her - he reveals himself by yelling for her to stop and illuminating himself using his angel light so she can see where she is walking.Two things happen simultaneously.1) Michael, the arch angel, appears and strips Zachary of his wings and his ability to become ethereal for breaking the rules and revealing himself to humans.2) Miranda is attacked by a vampire and taken away to be the current Dracula’s princess heir.With Zachary stuck wandering the mortal world and Miranda a vampire princess how in the world is he going to protect her now?ETERNAL was a fast and enjoyable read. The pages fly by and getting to the end comes too soon. The third book in this series is called BLESSED and the characters from both TANTALIZE and ETERNAL will cross over and I for one can’t wait to see what happens when they meet. ( )