evernight

evernight
evernight #1
claudia gray
ya/vampires/romance
harper teen
published 2008

Bianca wants to escape.

She's been uprooted from her small hometown and enrolled at Evernight Academy, an eerie Gothic boarding school when 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.

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.

Fuck this book.

The ridiculous of the storytelling drove me insane.  I can't really review this without spoilers so just so you know SPOILERS AHEAD....

My first huge beef with this book is the prologue.  Bianca mentions her 'new friends'.  When we get to this scene in the book you realize she's known all but two of these people for maybe 3 minutes.  Wow, you make friends that fast?  The second thing?  In the prologue vampires are mentioned.  So there you go.  We now know this is a book about vampires (if you didn't already know).

What you're led to believe during the first almost half of the book is that something strange is going on and it has something to do with the school.  Lucas, Bianca's love interest (whom she falls in desperate love with IMMEDIATELY and is ridiculous about it ever after that) is suspicious of everyone and everything at the school and wants to protect Bianca, but she isn't sure there's anything to be protected from besides social outcast-ness despite the fact that she tried to run away from school the day of orientation.

Then, all of sudden, 40% into the book, Bianca BITES LUCAS WITH HER FANGS AND DRINKS HIS BLOOD.  WTF.  From then on we read about how she grew up knowing she was a vampire child and drank blood every morning with her breakfast and her father is 1,000 years old, blah, blah, blah.  Are you kidding me?  Again, WTF?!

Now it would be one thing if the story was told from Lucas's point of view and all of a sudden we're like, whoa the chick's a vampire!  Holy crap!  Because Lucas didn't know that.  But the story is Bianca's story.  We're in her head and she knows she's a vampire.  She knows her parents, her roommate, the headmistress, the teachers, she knows they're all vampires!  Therefore, we should know they're vampires.

And then this happens:

"A hundred dollars! That's only half what it cost!" I protested. And it was worth so much more than money. I'd worn it virtually every day for months, the visible symbol of the love I felt for Lucas. How could this man look at it so coldly?

Um, maybe because he's a pawnshop dealer, a stranger to you and you're an idiot?!

See, I already hate Bianca.  She's got no personality, not backbone, no spunk.  She's wishy washy and whiny.  She's completely oblivious to everything around her.  When the first meet, Lucas mentions his great-great grandfather went to Evernight 150 or some odd years ago and broke the stain glass window.  Now, we know (after we find out about vampires) that this is the first time Evernight has allowed humans into the school.  Therefore, something is not right about Lucas's story.  And she never puts it together.  Even though she remembers the story and even tells it to her parents and the only interesting character in the story, Balthazar.

I just can't stand her.  It gets worse and it makes me insane.  The book ends very incomplete.  There is no closure and it's obvious there is another book after (for the record, there's 5) but I don't even care.  I want to know nothing else about Bianca and Lucas.  I wish they would die and the story would move on to another character, but I doubt that will happen so I'll just leave now, thanks.