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The Curse of the Cobalt Moon

Excerpted from PEN, 11.20

Here’s another Halloween treat in hemophilia! The Curse of the Colbalt Moon by Lou Hernandez (Austin Macauley Publishers, 2019) is a fictional book for teens, that includes vampires and hemophilia!

Rodolfo Josue Puig, who goes by “Joshua” to fit in, is a high school junior living in South Miami. Born in Cuba, Joshua was only nine when he was specially airlifted with other Cuban children to America in 1960. With no family members to help him, Joshua lives in a foster home. He loves playing on the varsity baseball team. Like his grandfather, Joshua has hemophilia that he treats with a daily injection of fibrinogen. After a fight with a teammate, Joshua is suspended from the school baseball team for his hemophilia, not because of the altercation. From a classmate, also from Cuba, Joshua learns that he is a “docile” half-vampire because his human mother married a vampire.

On the hunt night of the cobalt moon, hostile half-vampires (having a human father and vampire mother) drain the blood from docile half-vampires to become full vampires. Joshua and his classmates (some are also docile half-vampires) make many fatal errors of judgment while fleeing for their lives, but they eventually escape. Apparently, being a docile half-vampire improves baseball skills and reduces the bleeding due to hemophilia! The treatment of hemophilia seems inappropriate for the 1960s, and the genetics of vampires is never fully explained.

But every vampire story is a bit different, isn’t it?

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