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With so many readers getting caught up in the Twilight craze, it’s almost impossible for young adult vampire novels by other authors to get noticed. That’s why I decided to head to Wal-Mart to search the shelves for something other than Stephenie Meyer. When I ran across P.C. and Kristin Cast’s House of Night Series, I thought, Hmmm…this might be good. And I was right.
The last thing Zoey Montgomery needs is an undead guy marking her as a vampyre in front of her friends and the entire school. Now she has no choice but to leave her home and friends to attend the House of Night Boarding School, where fledgling vampyers are taught the finer points of vampyrism. That is, if they survive the change. A few don’t.
Once at the school, Zoey can choose her own name, so she goes with her grandmother’s name, becoming Zoey Redbird. Soon, Zoey begins to make friends at the House of Night, and she decides that becoming a vampyre might not be so bad after all—until she develops a freaky lust for blood too early in the change. She also discovers that she has a powerful goddess-given gift that hasn’t been bestowed upon a fledgling in a long time.
When the leader of the Dark Daughters, the school’s most elite group, starts abusing her powers, Zoey is tested beyond her courage to set things right with a little help from her new vampyre friends.
If there were a rating for books, I would have to give Marked a PSC rating (parents strongly cautioned) for references to sex and drugs, as well as mild foul language. I never thought I’d see the f-word, or references to oral sex, in a book meant for young adults. However, only the secondary characters get mixed up in the drugs, language, and sex, and the authors are careful not to glamorize the acts or describe them in any great detail.
Aside from the above, though, Marked gave me the creeps, made me laugh, and kept me spellbound with the beginning of Zoey Redbird’s journey to becoming a vampyre. Zoey isn’t perfect, nor should she be—she’s a teenager, trying to find her way through life—but she’s a likable character with a good heart. A small amount of teen angst adds to the plot, rather than overwhelming it.
Marked is a dark and mysterious read that’s interspersed with humor to lighten things up when the darkness threatens to dominate the plot. When the end approaches, hinting of something evil lurking in the future, you’re going to want more, like I did. Once I finished reading it, I made a quick trip back to Wal-Mart and picked up the rest of the books in the House of Night Series.
