Sisters Rowan, Kestrel and Jade Redfern are vampires who don't really feel like playing by the misogynistic and old-fashioned rules of the Night World any more. Unfortunately they're part of a very important family and can't just be let to go visit their aunt who left the community years before. Their brother, Ash, is sent to retrieve them. Mary-Lynette and her brother Mark are initially suspicious of the girls, especially after their Aunt isn't present. However, relationships may be brewing between the two humans and two of the vampires, due to the recently re-energized 'soulmate principle'
The major themes of this series are becoming clear: A Night World member will (either reluctantly or enthusiastically) fall in love with a human, reveal the secret and they will go on the run. I assume this eventually ends with the human-friendly Night World folks at war with the 'humans are food' camp. Should be a fun ride. ( )

This is the second installment of L.J. Smith's Night World series, which debuted in the mid 1990s, and featured a hidden world of vampires, witches and shape-shifters. When Rowan, Kestrel and Jade Redfern - three beautiful but unearthly sisters - come to live in Briar Creek, Oregon, Mary-Lynette Carter and her brother Mark find themselves drawn into their dangerous secret. Vampires on the run from the restrictive Night World, the three girls and their new friends must confront a possible vampire-hunter, as well as the sinister Ash Redfern, come to recapture the runaways...

Smith continues her world-building in Daughters of Darkness, revealing more about the "Night World," with its male chauvinism, and "species bigotry." She builds upon the "Soulmate Principle," which also appeared in Secret Vampire, and in a trend that would continue throughout the series, featured the previous installment's "villain" as the romantic lead.

The teen melodrama is a little thick at times, but Smith's narrative has much to recommend it, and I find that I prefer it to the more current (and much more well-known) Twilight saga. At heart, Night World is about the redemptive power of forbidden love, and features fairly complex characters, some of whom start out bad, but end up good. The girls are usually smart and strong-willed, and the romantic resolutions are not always smooth.

Daughters of Darkness stands out in this respect, and has always been one of my favorites. Mary-Lynette is a strong, caring, and very intelligent young woman, and despite her overwhelming "pre-destined" attraction to Ash, she does not surrender any of her principles. Prejudice, whether between different human groups, or between vampire and werewolf, is an "ugly thing," and she has no hesitation in condemning it, even in her soulmate. A brilliant amateur astronomer, she quotes Shakespeare (The Taming of the Shrew), and responds to Ash's declaration of love with references to Pride and Prejudice.

Perhaps most impressive of all, Mary-Lynnete decides to stay exactly who she is: "She was Mary-Lynette, and someday she'd discover a supernova or a comet or a black hole, but she'd do it as a human. And Ash would come back next year. And she would always love the night." In short, L.J. Smith offers everything that is missing in Stephanie Meyer's work, and I highly recommend this series to any reader who was dissatisfied with the latter. ( )

Review courtesy of Dark Faerie Tales.

Quick & Dirty: A slow but exciting plot supports the dynamic development of a forbidden relationship.

Opening Sentence: ”Rowan, Kestrel, and Jade,” Mary-Lynnette said as she and Mark passed the old Victorian farmhouse.

Review:

It’s not uncommon for me to be unsure of how I feel about a book before I finish it. This is one of those instances because looking back, I don’t actually remember feeling one way or another about what was happening. All I know is, I could’t stop reading. It wasn’t the murder mystery that kept me inticed. It wasn’t the need for Mary-Lynnette, a simple astronomy loving girl, to get to the truth about the three mysterious sisters that moved into the home near hers that kept me turning pages. I kept reading this story because the whole thing just flowed so smoothly from one point to the next that I never felt like there was an appropriate place for me to walk away. So I didn’t, I kept right on reading happily.

The biggest saving grace for this story has to be the characters. The three sisters, Rowan, Kestrel, and Jade have very different, very defined personalities which don’t actually change at all with the development of the story. They are the characters that readers can kind of choose to side with in a way. Rowan is described as gentle and wise, where Kestrel is fierce and intimidating, while Jade is young and innocent. These girls speak to all the teenagers out there who just want to see if they can make it out in the world alone. They have to make a lot of decisions that could determine the rest of their lives, but they don’t actually develop in any way. Usually their lack of growth would bother me a lot, but their brother Ash goes through enough change to pacify me.

Ash Redfern is the usual vampire bad-boy type with the better than everyone mentality and the usual predjudices against humans and other creatures of the night. He’s a loner who only uses human girls for food and whatever else he wants from them. However, his whole personality is challenged when he meets Mary-Lynnette, a human girl with a fighting spirit he’s never seen before. The development between these two is fast but realistic. At first, they hate each other pretty completely. She hates cocky guys who appear to get by only on their looks, and he hates girls who are…well…human. So naturally their relationship is tense, but then we are introduced to the Soulmate principle. The principle comes up in this story’s prequel, but it is far more exciting in this situation. It describes the feeling of love as shocking and intense. Soulmates recognize each other through the instant electricity they feel at contact. If two souls accept this “forever love” the feeling can cause extreme ecstacy and warmth, but if the two try to fight it, it becomes a bit terrifying with lightning errupting within each of them as they fight what’s meant to be. I doubt I’m the only one who thinks this, but watching a sexy man struggle to protect the woman he loves from not only himself but also the evils of the world while trying to also keep her at a distance to protect is own heart, is possibly one of the hottest things ever.

Anyone who loves watching a forbidden romance grow without dominating the storyline will enjoy this book. And everyone who enjoys reading about hot guys should take heart and know that Ash shows up again later as the series continues.

Notable Scene:

Rowan and Kestrel were looking at each other, and then at Mark and Mary-Lynnette. And their expressions made Mary-Lynnette’s throat close.

“You shouldn’t have followed us,” Rowan said. She looked grave and sad.

“They shouldn’t have been able to,” Kestrel said. She looked grim.

“It’s because they smell like goats,” Jade said.

“What are you doing?” Mark shouted again, almost sobbing. Mary-Lynnette wanted to reach for him, but she couldn’t move.

Jade wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Well, can’t you tell?” she turned to her sisters. “Now what are we supposed to do?”

There was a silence. Then Kestrel said, “We don’t have a choice. We have to kill them.”

FTC Advisory: I purchased my own copy of Night World, Vol. 1. No goody bags, sponsorships, “material connections,” or bribes were exchanged for my review. ( )

Found this book laying around because my daughter's been playing with all my old books from high-school. It's funny how you have a whole different take on a book after 15 years have gone by. I loved it when I was in high school. I still loved it now, but mostly because of the nostalgia. The book itself is a love story between small-town girl Mary-Lynnette (how did the author think up that name?) and bad-boy vampire Ash, who has three vampire sisters on the run. Nothing terribly exciting happens except for a brief run-in with a werewolf. Still. It's worth reading this book just to hear the descriptions of 90s clothes. These kids were stylin'. ( )

This is probably my least favourite book in the whole series. Despite it being the second, I didn't read it until long after I'd read all the other Night World books, but my distaste for it isn't solely due to the fact that it can't really compare to the novels that came after. This book not only can't stand the test of time (do teenagers even know what a Walkman is anymore?), but had a good number of flaws that would have been evident even at the time of writing.

For example, there's a scene quite early on in which two teenage boys start in on their attempt to rape three girls. When these girls reveal themselves to be vampires, one of them shouts, " How the freak did you do that? What the freak are you?" Freak? Really? A guy who's about to rape someone isn't going to play by PG language rules. If you can't have swearing in your story, don't try for swearing. Toning it down and substituting words just makes the whole situation look absurd, and is rather insulting to the intelligence of the reader.

Second example I can think of is when characters are wondering who might be the killer they're all looking for. They land on a character who was mentioned only once or twice before that, and in passing: Bunny Marten. They suspect Bunny because of her name; born-vampires tend to have names related to nature in some way. Bunny is obvious, of course, but one character then says, "And isn't a marten a kind of weasel?" Yes, it is, but the spelling of her last name was never mentioned, and it's not as though a more common spelling isn't "Martin." It may have the same root, but it's one heck of a leap, and a leap that only makes sense if the character suggesting it knows the odd spelling. Which she doesn't.

The story itself wasn't particularly engaging, either. Standard whodunnit mystery involving the death of a vampire. The killer turns out to be a mad werewolf who doesn't display any signs of actually being insane until he's triggered by jealousy, but apparently he was unhinged all along.

The only thing I really liked about this novel was the way to romance between Mary-Lynette and Ash was handled. The two are soulmates, which means that they're bound together whether they like it or not, and can't be truly happy without each other. Problem is that they don't get along, and outside of a few moments of teen lust, even admit that there's no way they can handle each other. But rather than refusing to acknowledge that, they agree to spend some time apart until they've both matured and come to grips with themselves and each other before exploring their connection any further. It was a refreshingly mature approach to the soulmate concept, and I really enjoyed seeing it.

Aside from a brief mention of a few characters in a later book, this is one that can be skipped over without losing anything of the series as a whole, and I highly recommend doing so. You don't miss much, and you get to spare yourself the trouble of reading a clumsy novel that was subpar even for a decade and a half ago. Overall, not really worth it. ( )