Evernight by Claudia Gray
pages: 327
released: June 2008
publisher: HarperTeen
cover love: ♥
Bianca wants to escape. She’s been uprooted from her small hometown and enrolled at Evernight Academy, an eerie Gothic boarding school where the students are somehow too perfect: smart, sleek, and almost predatory. Bianca knows she doesn’t fit in. Then she meets Lucas. He’s not the “Evernight type” either, and he likes it that way. Lucas ignores the rules, stands up to the snobs, and warns Bianca to be careful—even when it comes to caring about him. “I couldn’t stand it if they took it out on you,” he tells Bianca, “and eventually they would.” But the connection between Bianca and Lucas can’t be denied. Bianca will risk anything to be with Lucas, but dark secrets are fated to tear them apart . . . and to make Bianca question everything she’s ever believed. (from Goodreads)
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON 10/18/2010 ON BOOKSLIKESTARS.NET
Review:
I was half way through Evernight and I didn’t like it at all. I was literally dragging through it but that never stops me from finishing a book. The characters were kind of flat and not well rounded, and so was the plot. And the setting (Evernight Academy is described as “gothic”. Just because you put a dark building on a creepy landscape with gargoyle outside your window doesn’t make it gothic). The whole book seemed rushed and the author did not craft the story well enough for me to enjoy it. I mean, I can deal with an okay plot if I like the characters in the book or vice versa, but this book was lacking on both sides of that spectrum. There was nothing special about any of the characters, at all. I didn’t think the love between Bianca and Lucas was believable. They fall in love but you never see how they got to the love part. Their attraction is not played out, Gray just kind of pastes it in. Bianca and Lucas have a brief, fifteen minute encounter in the first chapter and from what I read there is nothing in that conversation that would make either of them fall head over heels for each other like it is perceived in the story. The worst part of this book is the fact that before page 138, Bianca is just a regular teen dealing with being at a new creepy school with uppity schoolmates and falling for the “mysterious boy”…then all of sudden…she turns out to be a vampire the whole time. In fact, the entire school is a Vampire Academy. What? The? Hell? Gray was already on thin ice with the plot and characters but this right here is what killed it for me. The story is told from Bianca’s perspective. How can Gray have a vampire tell the story, with no hint that she is one? You don’t have to come right out and say it if you want it to be a surprise but you have to drop a few hints at least, you’re leaving your readers in total darkness (FYI: we hate that). It made no sense. Plus, the whole scenario on vampires (how they become them, how Bianca was born, their whole history) is floppy and hardly explained and what was explained is completely unbelievable. For instance, the “IPod” scene. It’s when the students are in a class where they learn about modern day electronics. Okay, if these privileged, rich, academic vampires don’t know what electronics are or how they work then the author should’ve had Bianca fully explain why. Trust me, I love vampires, but not the ones from Claudia Gray’s world.
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