Sookie Stackhouse proves she's not Dead and Gone (Charlaine Harris)

From The Houston Chronicle --

Sookie Stackhouse proves she's not Dead and Gone --

By TARA DOOLEY --

May 15, 2009 --

For Sookie Stackhouse fans, it’s been a long year. Sure, September brought our Southern-fried heroine to the small screen in HBO’s True Blood. But even with the unexpected twists of the show, that plot was a little 2001 for anybody who’s been devouring Charlaine Harris’ book series since its inception.

A year after the last installment of the Southern Vampire Series, book number nine, Dead and Gone, hit bookstores this month. June 14, HBO turns on season two of True Blood with a set of characters that may turn out to be even more of a departure from Harris’s creation.

Luckily, Dead and Gone deposits book readers in familiar territory.

The plot takes up where we left our telepathic barmaid: In a world of supernatural creatures that mingle among the regular Wal-Mart shoppers of Bon Temps, the north Louisiana town where Sookie lives.

The witches are still camped out in Sookie’s house, the fairies remain mysterious, and the hunky vampires can’t seem to keep their fangs off her.

As Dead and Gone opens, werewolves have decided to follow the vampires’ lead and announce their presence to the human world. Alternative lifestyles, it seems, cannot bear to stay underground when there are supernatural reality TV shows to develop.

“Coming out” creates some trouble in Bon Temps, and the regular world seems interested in Sookie’s special talents. All this free-to-be-you-and-me attitude leaves only the fairies to wreak havoc under the radar.

Sookie must uncover the threats, beat back the danger and find love, perhaps in all the wrong places.

Of course, that is why we come back to the series year after year: To root for Sookie. She’s the oddball who lurks in us all.

To the regular world she is chubby, weird and underemployed. In Harris’ fantasy world, Sookie is an irresistible princess. And as Sookie and every modern princess with a head on her shoulders knows, only she can get the job done right, friends and family disappoint as often as they deliver, and sometimes the prince turns out to be a frog.

Or a vampire.