After a Vampire Tracker Marks her with a crescent moon on her forehead, 16-year-old Zoey Redbird enters the House of Night and learns that she is no average fledgling. She has been Marked as special by the vampyre Goddess Nyx and has affinities for all five elements: Air, Fire Water, Earth and Spirit. But she is not the only fledgling at the House of Night with special powers. When she discovers that the leader of the Dark Daughters, the school’s most elite club, is mis-using her Goddess-given gifts, Zoey must look deep within herself for the courage to embrace her destiny – with a little help from her new vampyre friends (or Nerd Herd, as Aphrodite calls them).
- Marked by PC + Kristin Cast
Today's review is all about Marked by PC and Kristin Cast!
This is the first novel of the House of Night series, which chronicles the beginning of Zoey Redbird's life as a vampire- excuse me, 'vampyre'.
I enjoyed this book very much when I read it while I was a sophomore in high school. I identified strongly with the angst of adolescence and adored Zoey's strong, caring personality.
It also gets into some religious-politic-issue goodness, if only a bit here and there. As a Pagan, I immediately took to seeing my feelings on the more accepted religious faction(s) written in a novel.
Why, might you ask, does this book get a bit of all that in there? Well, ***SPOILER ALERT***, these vampires aren't your run-of-the-mill bloodsuckers. They're well-cultured and mostly integrated into society, with actual schools teaching their anatomy and biology in science classes along with the usual curriculum. They're exceedingly religious, having a sort of Wiccan/Pagan base to their faith, in which they worship Nyx, the goddess of....You guessed it! Night. Like Wiccans and Pagans, these vampires are also a fairly peaceful people who revere their deity, her counterpart, and the elements.
But. Oh. My. Gosh.
You haven't heard the best part, yet.
This world has vampire finishing school.
Vampire. Finishing. School.
Yes, it is just as amazing and cool as it sounds! Imagine history classes taught by teachers that were there when the actual events happened! Imagine, instead of PE, you could participate in fencing class, tai kwan do, or horse-back riding. Yeah. Pretty darn-diddly cool.
So, add together the facts that our protagonist is a teen-age girl who's just begun her transformation into a vampire, her incredibly prejudiced and religious family, teen-age drama....Oh, yeah, and the fact that Nyx has chosen her for some mysterious purpose, you get one hell of a plot-line. Seriously.
The culmination of all that teen-age drama plus the vampire stuff equals some truly great story-base.
I give this beauty of a book three out of five stars!
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