Meh. 
 When I first heard about this book (told through text messages, emails, and the like), I was really excited. I love nontraditional text structures, and I love to have different things to recommend to my students. 
 This ended up being something of a disappointment. 
 1. Black uses the framework and characters of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Which is fine. But in this day and age, if you have kids that haven't read the original, many of those references are lost, particularly since some of them fill entirely different roles in this tale. Quincy Morris has a mere cameo, as does Seward. 
 2. The text message format...set my teeth on edge. She lapses into text-speak frequently. Phrases like "C U later," "i luv u," and "R U there?" abound in the narrative. Which I hate, and honestly, I think trivialize the original story beyond what I could stomach. There ARE people who write grammatically correct text messages. 
 3. As I read about Van Helsing's and Mina's search for the Count and Lucy, all I kept thinking was "Scooby Doo. This is like an episode of Scooby Doo." Meddling kids and all that rot. 
 4. Mina's several-emails-long summary of the climax, sent not to anyone still alive, but to Lucy, who is dead. (No screeching about spoilers, please. If you've read Dracula, you already know she dies.) And that is an incredibly uninspired climax. Perhaps that part of the story just wasn't suited to this format. 
 5. Mina and Jonathan were supposed to share a great love...that love is considerably weakened in this book as well. Why was it necessary to pursue the story line re: infidelity? 
 I'm sure there will be a lot of teen readers who would find this enjoyable. And for THAT, it earned 3 stars. MY specific response, however, was 2 stars. I just couldn't get the image of Van Helsing and Mina racing off to the Mystery Machine out of my head. I think the follow-through on the idea needed work.