Review: “The House of Night” series
This series was suggested to me by the mother of a girl in an organization my younger daughter is also involved in. These are very much teenage-girl books and are all about the vampires.
Currently, there are six novels in the series, and the time frame isn’t even a year. Really book 2 (Betrayed) picks up within hours of the conclusion to book 1 (Marked). That was my biggest complaint with the series. Here we have a vampire high school and, six books in, we have very little character growth among the main characters. Yes, they grow. But the six books seem so much like one really long, thousand page novel, that there isn’t a lot.
The theme of the series is really the choice between good and evil, something that can touch everyone no matter where they are in life. There’s even a moral to the series; which is that you always have a choice between good and bad, light and dark, truth and evil.
To summarize the books, Zoey Redbird has recently found out she’s been chosen to become a vampire. That means leaving the home and school and friends she has known and moving to the House of Night. Once at the House of Night, Zoey finds out that she’s not just going to be a vampire. The tell-tale crescent that marks fledglings (or “vampires in the making”) are usually just outlines until the person becomes a full-blown vamp. In Zoey, the mark is already filled in and she has the accompanying tattoos — both things that are unheard of in fledglings. So not only does Zoey have to deal with the new school, new friends issues, but there’s a major bad guy in the school and it’s up to Zoey and her crew to fight for the good.
One of the things I really enjoyed about the series is that it’s written by a mother-daughter team. I liked that because it’s written for pre-teens or young teens and I know the collaboration gave the store a bit more realism especially in the language of the teen characters and their likes and dislikes.
I read all six books in about two weeks. They were easy and didn’t require a lot of thought. I did feel the “teenage drama” was a little over-the-top. In fact, my 16-year-old daughter read the first book and thought the drama was a bit much. She summed the series up by saying “it’s Harry Potter meets Twilight plus more drama then you could ever imagine.”
I tend to agree with her.
Blessings!
Nichole