"House of Night is a thrillingly engaging book series that follows 16-year-old Zoey Redbird, who gets “Marked” by a vampyre tracker and begins to undergo the “Change” into an actual vampyre. She has to leave her family in Tulsa and move into the House of Night, a boarding school for other fledglings like her.
It’s within the school’s walls that the heart of the action takes place as Zoey meets new friends, finds love, comes to terms with how her life will be different now and begins to realize her awesome new powers.
Here’s the deal though: Yes, Zoey’s a vampyre now. But she’s still a teenager – with all the humor, angst and confusing feelings any other teenager has." ~http://www.houseofnightseries.com/pages/overview.html
This summary is accurate and vague. The first two books were good, obviously or I wouldn't have continued. Books three and four were okay and by book five and six I didn't care. I actually started book six got about seventy-five pages in and realized that the characters annoyed me and I didn't care about their drama so I stopped and put it down. I returned it to the library unfinished (which I rarely do). I will probably revisit it later this year but we'll just have to see.
I can't say that the ideas involved were horribly new but pieces were different. All vampire (or vampyre) novels involve a 'Change' and this one was no different. Some involve it being lovely and easy, others indicate it is violent and painful. This takes a bit of both ideas and winds them together with a bit of a 'Harry Potter boarding school' twist. Taking a brief moment to compare this series (thus far) to Harry Potter I have to point out that HP is by far superior. The writing, ideas, etc but one aspect, the time line, was much more agreeable. In HP each book is a year in the school life of the main character, by book six in the House of Night series only two months had gone by. There was entirely too much drama for one person (supernatural or not) for that short a period. It would have been a tad more enjoyable had the time line been longer, at the point that I put the book down the characters had become way too melodramatic, foolish, one-sided, and unbelievable (in a bad way). The main character, Zoey, turned from a decent, fairly moral person to a complete ho...which I'm sure was the intent of the authors to show how difficult her life was. The only positive in her personality which remained throughout the series was loyalty to her Grandmother, her Goddess, and her friends.
If you choose to read even one of these books remember that it is for young 'adults'. Had it not been for the sexual nature of some of the scenes I would say it would be geared toward those around twelve or thirteen years old. It's simple minded, has a predictable plot, overly dramatic (I mean seriously, you really want us to believe all that happened in two months???), and finally the characters went from endearing to annoying in a very short time. Perhaps wait a month between each book as this might help with the annoyance factor. Should I finish the series I'll write an update about the last three books. At this point I would say skip it.
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