Title: House of Night series: Untamed, Hunted and Tempted

Author: P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast

Publisher: Atom/ Little Brown

Price: Rs. 299 each

Those who have read the first three books in the series: Marked, Chosen and Betrayed know what I am talking of. Well the next three books in the series are as exciting as the previous ones and perhaps even more. Overall, I think they are more exciting and gripping than the Twilight series.

Untamed

Zoey Bird is having a real bad time at the House of Nights. Her friends are avoiding her, her boyfriends have abandoned her and of the two best friends that support her, one is undead and the other is not even marked. And over this she has the feeling Nefret is no more working for the goddess, especially after she declared war against humans, but the question is if she isn’t working for the goddess then whom is she working for? And what is the significance of the ravens surrounding the school? Will what her grandmother foretold come true? Read to find out.

Hunted

The story opens with Stevie Ray brought down into Tulsa’s Prohibition- tunnels, injured by Stark’s arrow. Of course she is cured. Things go on fine for sometime or do they? Zoey’s dreams are haunted by Kalona and she is attracted to him despite not wanting to. Her human boyfriend and vampire boyfriend are both tiresomely possessive. Dark shadows seem to lurk around. She has the feeling Stevie Ray is hiding something from her perhaps. And no one knows what exactly is happening up there.

Circumstances force them to go back to the House of Night to find out that it can no more be called home. All seem to have been brainwashed and mesmerised by Kalona and Nefret and Stark seem to have changed for the worse. What will happen next? Will friendship, loyalty, faith in yourself and others bring bright victory or will the Fallen Angel win in the end?

Tempted

Zoey and her group of friends are able to banish Kalona and Nefret from Tulsa. But serious issues are yet to be sorted out. Zoey is having a tough time handling Erik and his jealousy from Stark — her warrior, and Heath — her human boyfriend or consort. The fledglings of House of Night seem to feel they were better off with Nefret, Stevie Ray seems to be hiding deadly secrets, doing things which may soon be the death of her. Most importantly in Zoey’s dreams Kalona still lurks and she is haunted by the feeling of being the incarnation of A-ya, the one who led to Kalona’s downfall by sacrificing herself in the history. She soon has to confront the evil again, distinguish between truth and illusions and protect herself from what Stark is scared of, the pre-told future. Will she save herself and in turn save others? Or will evil prevail again? That’s a question only the book can answer… And do read it as it has a surprising ending that can’t be guessed.

Shruti is a Std XI student at St. John’s School, Besant Nagar

Source: The Hintu
By: SHRUTI KAMATH

Zoey and her group manage to get a little bit of sleep but there are still more issues to be handled. Zoey of course has the boyfriend issues. She has gone from having Erik and Heath to worry about to now also having Stark, her warrior who has a close bond to her. Erik is getting more and more possessive and it is becoming increasingly hard for Zoey to handle. Talk about Drama.

When the group decides to return to the house of night they find that their home is in turmoil and the only thing to explain it is that Kalona and Neferet are still alive, and still have a hold on them. This thought is confirmed by finding out that they are at the high council in Italy.

This book takes so many twists and turns that you don’t see coming that it keeps you engrossed. Your wondering what is going to happen next and how could it possibly get any more different. The writing is engaging and develops the story well. And the ending will leave you wishing it was April already for the new release.

By: Ambrosia Jefferson
@ Associated Content

Once again the Cast’s have found a way to pull us into a world of Vampires and Humans and to make it believable that they co exist and do so without much trouble. There are some conflicts of course especially with the religious zealots the People of Faith. But the parallels aren’t so far away with some things in the real world. So I can do nothing but once again recommend this book series for anyone who likes the genre. So if you haven’t started the series yet do so now, and make sure you get to this one fast. It is a great read.
Source: Associated Content
By: Ambrosia Jefferson

“Angie: “Marked” is the perfect combination of the “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” series.

Our heroine, Zoey Redbird, is marked — a tattoo on her forehead; sound familiar? — to be a vampire. Getting marked means leaving your family behind to attend the House of Night school with other vamps in training.

Zoey’s family life pretty much sucks so leaving it behind is freeing. Again, familiar? Once she is at school she immediately meets the blonde bully, the curly-haired best friend, and the “twins,” two roommates who aren’t actually related but are so similar in personality that they are dubbed the twins.

Do you have whiplash from shaking your head “no!” in total disbelief? Me too!

The storyline isn’t all that original, but it’s a fun read if you are yearning for teen angst and feral desire in the guise of a vampire transformation. I do love my metaphors.”

Credit: Albert Lea Tribune
By: Angie Barker

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Evermore is the first book in Alyson Noël’s new YA series, The Immortals.  Fittingly, considering the title, a lot of E words popped into my mind when I was thinking of how to describe it:  Enchanting.  Exciting.  Enthralling.  Enticing.  All of them words, as well, of seduction and magic, which are two of the book’s main themes.

The third is loss.

The book is about Ever, who was the sole survivor of a car crash that took the lives of her parents and younger sister and necessitated her move from Oregon to California for her last two years of high school.  At her aunt’s, Ever has withdrawn into herself, dressing to be invisible and making friends with the biggest misfits in her school, Goth-girl Haven and simpering Miles.  Grief is not the sole reason for her new persona, however—Ever came back from her brush with death with the ability to read people’s emotional auras and learn their entire history with a touch.  Compounding her fears for her own sanity is her little sister, who insists on visiting her almost daily from the other side.  But when a new boy named Damen joins Ever’s class, she discovers someone whose aura she cannot read and whose voice and touch will dispel the sights and sounds of everyone else’s minds.  Even as Ever resists her attraction to Damen, she is falling in love with him—even though she knows she has no idea what he actually is.

Overall, I really liked this book.  It is in the current popular vein of Twilight or P.C. and Kristin Cast’s House of Night series, in that it’s a teenage paranormal story.  Noël’s world doesn’t have vampires or werewolves (at least, not yet), but it does have psychics, souls, and mysterious and powerful immortals.  She doesn’t couch spirituality in terms definitive enough to link it to one religion over another, but there is a spiritual aspect in that the reason Ever’s sister can come to visit and the notion of reincarnation are used as plot points in the story.  I thought it was a slightly different take on our world, familiar enough to be deceptively comfortable and believably rendered where it diverged.

One of the strengths of this book is the way it forces you to empathize with Ever at all times.  Noël did a masterful job of portraying the emotional black hole the loss of your entire immediate family would leave; I found Ever’s reactions to her powers and to her situation entirely believable.  Even when I was mentally begging Ever to wise up and make the “right” choice, I couldn’t really blame her for not doing so.  That is a common theme in YA literature, that agony as you watch the character make the wrong choices over and over again until they “grow up” enough to finally make what is obviously the better decision.  A lot of the time, however, the writer is not able to successfully pull off a sense of necessity in the character’s motivation or mode of thinking prior to that turning point.  But Noël did just that.  I might have wanted Ever to make different choices in the course of the narrative, but I understood why she could not, and that made her decisions merely heart-breaking instead of annoying.

Ever and her sister were the strongest characters in the book.  Damen was mysterious and inscrutable most of the time; while he was an enigma, he vacillated between interest and indifference too much (and with too little explanation later) to be as compelling for me as a reader as he was for Ever.  Haven’s need for attention created drama throughout the narrative, but she seemed to have little personality beyond her need for attention, just as Miles seemed to have little beyond the snappy retorts of his “witty gay man” persona.  I appreciated that Noël included conflict involving the friends that had nothing to do with Damen, but I wish the friends had had a little more depth.

Just a quick warning to anyone thinking of giving this book as a gift:  it might be better suited to an actual teenager than a tween.  Miles is openly homosexual, and sexual matters such as virginity or lack thereof are discussed frankly between the friends and between Ever and Damen.  None of it is handled in an offensive or inappropriate manner, but if you’re more conservative or have a younger adolescent in mind, just be aware that those topics are included.

The villain of the story was lackluster, at best, and this affected the climax of the book.  She showed very little beyond the “woman scorned” template that has been played out many times before, and her taunts and torments to Ever were so melodramatic as to almost be caricatures.

My other main complaint is that when Ever finally learns the whole truth about her powers and Damen’s identity and exactly what has been happening in her life for the past few months, it is a chapter that might as well have been titled “Damen Explains Everything.”  Ever does not discover much on her own; she is simply told—the world is explained to her as it might be to a child.  I thought this was a clumsy way to handle the exposition of details about the world as it stands for the immortals, and an insult to Ever as a character, that she is not allowed to work any of it out for herself.  But after Ever learns the truth, she must still make the choice to use her new knowledge, or not, and I did like that she is given the chance to decide for herself what her destiny will be.

Noël’s prose is direct and easy to follow, and the world as seen through the eyes of Ever is an interesting place.  In all, I thought this was an above-average read from the YA paranormal section.

Trade paperback, February 2009, from St. Martin’s Griffin.

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September 15th, 2009 by Elena Nola
Website: BSC Review

Yup, I read yet another series of vampire novels, I’m blaming Alexander Skarsgård who plays Eric in ‘True Blood’ because he is so freaking hot that I just have to get more vampire loving. In truth, vampire novels are all over the place. I know that vampires never really fall out of pop culture vogue, but they are more prevalent in pop culture awareness than I have ever recalled. De La Cruz’s ‘Blue Blood’ series starts with the first book named appropriately enough ‘Blue Bloods’.

One of the most fun elements when it comes to vampire fandom is that ever series seems to take encompass its own set of vampire rules and regulations. In Stephenie Meyer’s case her ‘Twilight’ vampires never sleep and have no problems being in the sun except for the way they sparkle. Charlainie Harris’s blood suckers are organized in almost feudal communities and are trying to make strides in having equal rights with humans in their perspective lands. Anne Rice’s creations don’t have sex but manage to become rock Gods regardless. Melissa De La Cruz’s vampire lore is probably the most original; her vampire world is populated with fallen angles who are condemned to be vampires because of their unfortunate backing of you know who.

‘Blue Bloods’ is a fast read, the type of book that even a teen with no concentration can get through within an afternoon. This first book in the series outlines that the blue bloods that the world reads about from New York City actually have blood that is blue because they aren’t human. Schuyler Van Alen never fits into her world of prep despite her family’s long prestigious history amongst the other American blue bloods that came over on the Mayflower. She attends her blue blood based school wearing the latest in Goth gear and goes without washing her hair for freakishly long periods of time. Her best friend has been her male buddy since early elementary school. She lives with her grandmother in a mansion that is a shadow of itself while her mother lies in a hospital room from a coma that doctors can’t explain. Her life is just plugging along until she finds out that she is a vampire born from a vampire mother whose husband was human – the first such case in the history of vamps.

I can’t say I loved this book, or even the following books, there are three in the series with a fourth to be released in hardback in October. I am intrigued with the premise of these stories although I find the characters not well drawn out. Schuyler, despite being a New York blue blood vampire Goth, is as exciting as chalk. De La Cruz also makes her a teen model with a billboard in Times Square and still she makes the reader want to yawn.

Like the ‘House of Night’ novels written by mother & daughter team, P. C. Cast and Kristen Cast, the ‘Blue Blood’ books are written for primarily a young adult audience and feature high school aged characters. Both series appear to be written with a larger plot in mind especially De La Cruz’s books. As noted earlier, she has intriguing twists to her vampire genre although I could live without the whole twin marriage bit. If you start the books they don’t really seem to stand alone so you need to start with ‘Blue Bloods’.

Although I think there are better vampire books on the market, the ‘Blue Blood’ series is fun and all of the books are fast reads.

Credit: Examiner

By: Lisa Westerfield

Journey into the paranormal

Follow the saga of Zoey Redbird in the world of vampires and discover that all is not what it seems.
P.C Cast is a proficient author of romantic fantasy and paranormal literature. And she is not alone in her world of fantasy – her daughter Kristin Cast shares an equal part in her writing. Together this mother-daughter team is creating a fine mélange with their series The House of Night.

Entering a new world

As the title suggests, the series takes you to a new land of mysteries and whims; to the world of Zoey Redbird, a 16-year-old girl who is “marked” as a vampire by Nyx, the goddess of vampires. Marked with a crescent moon on her forehead, Zoey changes from a normal school girl to a vampire. She leaves her family and enters the world of The House of Night, the vampire finishing school that will train her to become an adult vampire.

Marked is about how she does her best to survive in this new world. The Casts have created a wonderful world where vampires really exist and they are usually some of the most successful people in the world. She makes friends as well as enemies in her new vampire world when she falls for school heartthrob Erik Night. Aphrodite, a charming and popular older student, makes her life miserable but Zoey is not weak-willed. In Marked, the Casts hint that evil is not always dark just as light does not always mean goodness.

Betrayed shows Zoey settling down in the House of Night. She now feels that she belongs there. She has also gained gifts from Nyx and made friends like Damien and Stevie Rae her roommate.

Unexpected twistsShe also has two boyfriends now, Erik and her human ex-boyfriend Heath Luck, whom she has imprinted. But Zoey’s life takes an unexpected turn when human teens, especially those she knew from her earlier life, start being killed. All the evidence points to the House of Night. Just when her life is in danger and she badly needs her friends her best friend Stevie Rae dies.

Zoey is now forced to look at the other side. She discovers the culprit behind the killings.

In Chosen, she finds that those who seemed like friends are now her enemies and those whom she thought were her enemies are good to her. Zoey also discovers her friend Stevie is ‘undead’ but Zoey has no clue how to help her. Anything Stevie and she discover should be kept under wraps for they can’t trust anyone in the House of Night.

Good introduction

The series is a good way to introduce those principles that teens normally roll their eyes at. So that in itself makes this an incredibly powerful series. Age is no bar, anybody who loves fantasy can pounce on these books.

Title: The House of Night

Author: P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast

Publisher: Atom

Price: £5.99

By Shruti Duarah

Shruti is a project manager in an E-Publishing company called Laser Words.

Marked is the first installment of the House of Night series by two very talented Oklahoma writers, P.C. Cast and her daughter Kristin Cast. This ingenious first book follows the tale of a young Cherokee girl who lives in a world where vampyres have always existed. Zoey Redbird’s life is turned upside down the day she discovers she is destined to become a vampyre and has been marked by a vampyre tracker. Her only choice is to join the mysterious House of Night or die of a sickness that comes when fledgling vampyres are not with their own kind. Rejected by her human friends, shunned by her parents, and getting sicker by the moment, Zoey runs to the only person she could still trust, her wise grandmother Redbird. On her way to her grandmother, Zoey is in an accident in which she hits her head  and has a revealing conversation with the vampyre goddess Nyx. When Zoey awakens, she discovers that her grandmother had taken her to The House of Night where Zoey is healed of her sickness and healed of the bump on her head. Zoey is then introduced to her new mentor, Neferet, High Priestess of the House of Night who has vowed to help Zoey through this transitional phase in life. Soon amazing things start to happen to Zoey, and she begins to realize that she is no ordinary vampyre fledgling. She discovers that the mark she bares on her forehead is that of a matured vamp, and with it comes extraordinary abilities given to her by the goddess Nyx. For a teen who only wants to fit in, extraordinary is something Zoey is unprepared to undertake on her own. With the help of new friends, her human ex- boyfriend, and vamp hottie Eric Night, Zoey is determined to find her place in this strange and magical world, and cope with her new found powers.

P.C .Cast along with her daughter Kristin have created a world that is fantastic and very believable. P.C.’s writing style and amazing character development has always given birth to novels that are true to life and dynamic. The Casts have an uncanny ability to make their readers care for their characters, and P.C. has one of the most unique literary voices in literature today. The way she injects humor into her narrative is a phenomenal talent that few authors possess.

Another great thing about this book, as with a few of P.C.’s other works, is that this book is set in Tulsa and surrounding areas. The House of Night is actually set on the campus of Cascia Hall. Zoey, as a human, went to Broken Arrow Intermediate High School, and the fierce rivalry between Broken Arrow and Union football was even mentioned. Also, a P.C. Cast book would not be complete without the customary reference of Cherry Street.

This book is obviously intended for a more mature YA audience. Some themes in this book are sexually explicit. Adult language and use of drugs and alcohol are also prominent in this book, so reader discretion is advised.

Marked, by P. C. and Kristin Cast is a novel that grabs onto the reader and holds him or her in a headlock until the very end. It is fast paced and extremely well written. The atmosphere and specific names and locations used in the story create an extra bit of interest for local readers, though sexual content and bad language may be a turnoff for some.

If you are “dying” to read Marked or any of the other books in the House of Night series prepare to buy the book or put your name on a waiting list at the library because your local Tulsa City County Library system can’t seem to keep these books on their shelves. And, if you’d like to be “Marked” yourself P.C. and Kristin have an excellent interactive website where you can upload a picture of yourself and place a special vampyre mark on your image. The link to the website is provided at the bottom of the page. If you have any questions, comments or just want to comment about the book feel free to comment at the bottom of the page or email me.

Credit: Teri Harvey