Evernight: 12/24/12

Evernight by Claudia Gray has once again reaffirmed my realization that I am not a fan of vampire romances. It opens as a fairly typical Gothic boarding school horror, with a new girl moving to the school and being a complete fish out of water. The students are richer and are aggressively cliquish.

As this is also a romance, there's of course, the mysterious, potentially dangerous, bad-boy. In a chance meeting before the school year starts, the girl (Bianca) and the boy (Lucas) meet and seem to have a connection. Except later, Lucas is cold to her and later is possessive of her — basically a soon to be abusive boyfriend.

Their dysfunctional relationship is played against the background of long, boring descriptions of Bianca's class schedule. I know, she's a teenager and she's at a boarding school — there's just not that much to talk about. That doesn't mean though, that I want to read 100 pages of her going to class. I just don't.

But what really did me in on this book — and the series as a whole — was Biaca's status as an unreliable narrator. As everything is told in first person, the fact that she neglects to tell some key facts about herself until she can no longer control her urges was just too much.

As soon as she finally drops that key piece of information, the whole conceit of the book falls apart. She does belong at the school and it's Lucas who doesn't. The main problem, though, is that the school doesn't make sense. Sure, many of these students have been in teenage bodies for decades, if not centuries, but why oh why do they willingly subject themselves to boarding school?

Three stars

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