Evernight

It is probably inevitable that any teen vampire romance published at this particular moment will invite comparisons (favorable or otherwise) to the wildly popular Twilight saga. I think however, that Claudia Gray's Evernight owes more to L.J. Smith's Nightworld series (one of my guilty pleasures), than to Meyer's work. Smith's endorsement, moreover, can be found on the back cover, and convinced me to give this a try.

The story of Bianca, a shy young woman who finds herself a student at the sinister Evernight Academy, where her parents have been hired as teachers, Evernight utilizes all the stereotypical indicators of "danger!" to set up a very conventional plot-line. It is most unfortunate that I read one of the "spoiler reviews" shortly show more before reaching the point at which Gray overturns her carefully orchestrated narrative crescendo, but I can honestly say that her "shocker" would otherwise have come as a complete surprise.

It's quite well done, and will have the reader looking back over the first half of the novel, recasting everything in light of new information. I know that some readers found Gray's inversion unconvincing, but I thought that all of Bianca's feelings and reactions could just as easily be set at the door of some garden-variety teen angst, and therefore had no trouble making the mental leap.

I WAS able to anticipate the second major revelation, partly owing to a newfound caution in reading Gray's text, and partly to my familiarity with the aforementioned L.J. Smith, whose work also features supernatural "Romeo and Juliet" type stories. Despite that fact, I found Evernight quite suspenseful, and very satisfying.

Star-crossed lovers? Check! Supernatural, folkloric beings? Check! Lots of teen angst? Check! Engaging and complex characters? Check! What's not to love? I'm ready for the sequel... show less

Holy. Freakin'. COW.

I've been enjoying the reading I'm doing as research for the agents I'd like to query about my own novel. I liked this book more than most from the beginning. It hooked me right in. But it was just a pleasant read, one I was going to give a resounding thumbs-up on Goodreads and then get on with my life.

And then I got about halfway through.

I've read good YA novels. I've read fun paranormal works. And I've read some great surprise endings (the twist in the last Hunger Games novel blew me right out of the water).

What I haven't encountered in as long as I can remember is a stunning surprise MIDDLE.

I literally jaw-dropped. Had to run down the hall and tell my husband (since I knew he wouldn't be reading it, so it's not show more like I was ruining it for him) what this writer had pulled off.

I'm not telling you any more. I stayed up late to finish this book and then checked my library's online catalogue to make sure that there were sequels. (There are three -- woohoo!) So I'm tired.

Just read it. I don't care how old you are, or if you're a boy or a girl. Read it and see if the middle trips you the way it did me.

Claudia Gray is so good, I'm almost not even jealous. show less

It’s not often that I pick up a book expecting a sappy, predictable read and wind up wowed, but this was my experience with Evernight. Let’s back up a bit, though. I tend to go a bit crazy at used bookstores. I picked up this book acknowledging that I haven’t been in the mood for vampire romances in a LONG time, but I couldn’t pass up the good deal (It was $5.40 but since I have standing credit there, I only paid $2.70 for the book). YA books tend to be on the expensive side, so when I see a popular read that other bloggers have reviewed, I pick it up.

So, six months later and stuck in bed with a sore ass, I decided to give Evernight a shot. I wanted a book that would entertain me, but I didn’t really want to read anything with show more too much substance, because I seem to be in a perpetual book slump as it is! While I wouldn’t say the book has much in the way of substance, it definitely surprised me. I certainly underestimated Claudia Gray’s talent!

Divider
Bianca is forced to attend Evernight Academy when her parents accept teaching positions and moved her away from her small town and the only home she’s ever had. She hates everything about the Gothic boarding school and she’s pissed that her parents forced her to move, knowing how nervous she is around strangers.

Bianca meets Lucas as she’s in the process of skipping school to show her parents how wrong they were to move her to the snobby school for rich kids. *cue eye roll* After their intense and awkward meeting, the brooding blonde haired, green-eyed boy warns her to be careful and that he’s not good for him. Of course, like all teenage girls dazzled by a hunky boy, she fails to listen and they start to bond over their common disdain for being forced to attend Evernight Academy.

“I’m so sorry I hurt you.” A hot tear trickled down my cheek. Poor Lucas, always trying to protect me from danger. He’d never guessed that I was the dangerous one.”
Okay, I had my doubts that Bianca would be an enjoyable heroine. She’s naive, she doesn’t head clear and obvious warning signs about Lucas, and she acts like a spoiled kid because the world isn’t fair and why does she have to move and get to know all the snobby “kids” of Evernight Academy when she clearly doesn’t belong? Sigh. I did my fair share of eye-rolling at the beginning (and towards the middle and at the end). Okay, so I questioned a lot of Bianca’s not-so-brilliant moves, but as the book moved along and I am finally privy to one of the most WTF PLOT TWISTS I HAVE EVER RUN ACROSS (which was really just a family secret that Gray was cruel enough to hide from us), I began to understand how a 16-year-old girl could really be so clueless. It’s partly her parents fault for her being so ignorant about her own heritage, so I can get over my less than pleasant thoughts over Bianca.

He said, “I like the gargoyles, the mountains, and the fresh air. That’s it so far.”

“You like the gargoyles?”

“I like it when the monsters are smaller than me.”
Putting my issues with Bianca aside, I really didn’t have *that* many issues with Lucas, other than the fact he was clearly hiding something. View Spoiler » My true love was for Balthazar, and you won’t convince me otherwise. I really don’t see what Bianca sees in Lucas, anyways. She knows nothing about him and has waaay more in common with Balthazar. I am totally team Biancazar. 😀

While I am not generally a fan of the love triangle, I really didn’t mind it in Evernight. (Although I know I’ll start to resent it if things don’t go my way. :P) Other then my obvious issues with Bianca and her personality, I enjoyed the world that Gray created. Yes, it’s not a completely YA paranormal romance theme and I could definitely see some similarities between Evernight and the Vampire Academy and the House of Night series, this book has its place and is unique in its own way.

I was able to logically connect the dots once all the plot twists were revealed in a shocking and brutally twisted--ahem, I mean creative way. I liked the mixture of predictable and surprising plot twists (even though they were very cruel, indeed) and even the world Gray created was a fascinating mixture of new and old vampire lore. I can’t wait to see what else Gray has in store for me in the next book! I can even deal with more love triangle drama, I just hope Balthazar is awarded his own happily ever after. show less

Okay, so this was awesome. As a general rule, I avoid vampire lit like the plague. I mean, Ann Rice is pretty cool because thus far I haven't read a book of hers that has that whole human/vampire love dynamic, which I hate.

Seriously, think about it -- human and vampire fall in love, vampire bites human, and they are stuck together until the end of the earth. I'm sorry, no matter how much I love somebody I would never commit to living for several centuries with them. You know why? Because people change and grow emotionally -- as would (hypothetically) vampires. Ideals and values change, and they don't always change in tandem. And in most vampire lit there's some sort of blood bond between vampires of the same . . . bite?

Then there's the show more other scenario in human/vamp love -- the vamp loves the human so much that they don't bite them, and you end up with two ways to go. One, human and vamp live together in harmony (rare) -- how dumb is that? An eternally young being being in a physical relationship with an 80-year old? You have got to be kidding me.

Scenario two, the human and the vamp go their separate ways, filled with forever love and regret. Sorry, again dumb. Vampires can live for as long as the earth exists -- longer, if space travel becomes commonplace and we do find other planets (ooooh, spaceman vampires!). Humans live an extremely finite period of time. So maybe the human will live a life of regret for their one lost true love, but the vampire will forget in less than a century -- two centuries if the human was exceptional.

Sorry, most vampire lit is retarded.

That said, despite my high disdain of vampire lit in general, this book was incredibly well-conceived and well-executed. The author writes in a beautiful and engaging manner, the characterizations are beautiful and the relations between everyone are perfectly written. This is a gem in the offal known as vampire lit. (I'm looking at you, Twilight). show less

Oh, Evernight... if you tried to be kind of like Twilight but hopefully not enough so people would make the comparison; you failed.

Firstly I should say, this author isn't a horrible writer, descriptions are good, tension builds quite well, settings are very clear. But when it comes to characters everything goes wrong.

For starters, the lead character Bianca seems to be a mish-mash of three or four conflicting personalities depending on the situation she's in; she starts out as timid, and then for some reason grows bold immediately.

Big spoiler here - Bianca is the vampire. About halfway through the book we discover this; she is one of only a handful of children actually born to vampire parents per century. As this is the first book in show more the series, I can only hope this goes into more detail but I don't hold out much hope. As the author has made mention that though Bianca's birth is rare, it's certainly not the only one, I as a reader am lead to believe that two dead beings in vampires conceived a child; and that this can happen for no apparent reason.

I don't think I can properly explain how much I don't believe the relationship with Bianca and Lukas. Think Edward and Bella, if Bella was the vamp but still the same weepy, sappy, pithy character. Without him; she feels lost; her life has no meaning unless she's with him, yawn, blah, vomit. Who are these boring women who have nothing in their lives but to wait for some mysterious guy to come and change their life?

Bianca's parents, who are both vampires, love to play records and dance and are quite happy drinking animal blood. That's another thing; the vampire lore of this book is totally skewed. While it's apparent fiction that holy water is dangerous to vampires, for some reason vampires can't cross water :S:S Is water good or bad then? I have read a LOT of fiction and mythology about vampires, and the romanticized view that people have of them nowadays makes me cringe. Vampires are dead. Pure and simple; that fact doesn't change. And the way these vampires apparently just want to live as humans makes no sense.

Back to Bianca for a second, the girl is completely out of her time. Even though she was born to vampire parents who are thousands of years old, she herself has been growing as a normal child with the destiny of becoming a vampire, but the girl goes mental over an antique brooch. Like all 16 year-olds :S

Another issue that mirrors the one I had with Twilight is that Bianca is more than happy to leave her comfortable life with her parents whom she adores and run off with Lucas (whom we discover is a vampire hunter and was sent to find out the secrets of vampires, yet when Lucas introduces Bianca to his vampire hunting family; they are all blissfully aware of what Bianca truly is. Bad vamp hunting if you can't spot one that's right in front of you).

Apparently Bianca and Lucas love each other, and for some reason keep saying it at the end of the book... but I don't feel it; the relationship is nothing to me. And once Lucas is gone; Bianca reverts to this boring, pining little girl whose pouting because the "love of her life who she's only known for a few months" is gone.

Back to characters for a second. There's a random girl who Bianca doesn't really mesh with, who after a chapter set a month later is now Biancas BFF. There's no connections here! Nothing ties to anything else! It's like the author had pieces of an idea and just stuck them together without realizing there should be some connection between the ideas. Another common thread in these books is how the apparently awkward, outcast that is our heroine, Bianca, who has never been the interest of the opposite sex, suddenly has two of the most popular and hottest guys of the school going after her. Screams of a sad author playing out a schoolgirl fantasy, I'm afraid.

I own the second book; and out of guilt for paying money for it I will read it; and I can only hope the sappy dialogue disappears because there is actually some merit in the story underneath the boring Romeo&Juliet love between the main characters.

I hated Twilight for the same reasons I didn't like this book; so in theory, if you like Twilight you'll like this :) show less

If I was to equate reading Evernight to anything, it would be stealing some icing from the container I found in the back of the cupboard. And eating it. I know I probably shouldn't be doing this, I'll probably regret it later, but it's sweet and addictive and... and...

Okay, so "sweet" is perhaps not the right word for Evernight. And I didn't find it at the back of the cupboard. It showed up on my LibraryThing recommendations, I looked it up on Amazon and read the first few pages, which caught my interest. So I reserved it at the library.
Bianca been uprooted from her small hometown and enrolled at Evernight Academy, where her parents are now teachers - an eerie Gothic boarding school where the students are somehow too perfect. Bianca show more knows she doesn't fit in.

Evernight does some things well. The first is create and maintain a sense of mystery, suspense and unease. It taps into some other things successfully: feeling you don't fit in, feeling you are a loser; fascination with boarding school (and eerie Gothic buildings); fascination with those who are rich and the perfect (no matter how snobbish and self-centred they are); and fascination with young men who don't play by the rules and display a protective streak (making statements such as "I couldn't stand it if they took it out on you, and eventually they would.") Some might be generally teenage-girl-only fascinations, but the story appeals to them, none the less.
There are a couple of pull-the-carpet-out-from-under-your-feet revelations. I was half-expecting them - which is to say, I was expecting there to be twists, but they were never quite what I had guessed. The main revelation didn't irritate me, although I do think the story would have been better had there not been that deception. The story lost something once the mystery after the first revelation, but from that point onwards, it was not black-and-white; it had complexities without a clear solution.

It is, obviously, a vampire novel (the title, the prologue and the mood at the beginning of the first chapter reminded me so much of Twilight I had to laugh.)
However, this is where it is worth mentioning that, I don't like vampires. Really don't like them. With good reason - I'm one of those sick-at-the-sight (or thought) of-blood types. I have read some vampire novels and liked them, (such as Robin McKinley's wonderful novel Sunshine), but it was in spite of the vampires, not because of them.

So whilst I enjoyed it - and will probably read the sequel, if only to find out what happens next - Evernight is not really my cup of tea. The, er, vampire-ness bothered me. I'm neither recommending it, nor not recommending it, because I thought it was enjoyable and silly and terrible (in a I-can't-believe-I'm-reading-this way)and found all references to drinking blood disturbing... I cannot make up my mind as to whether I liked it or not. show less

if you have any interest in contemporary YA fantasy and particularly if you're into vampires (which I myself am not, so take that as evidence that this book is a great read), you need to check out Claudia Gray's Evernight (HarperTeen, May 2008).I already knew that Claudia was an excellent writer from reading some of her short stories, so I wasn't surprised that I enjoyed her rich and vivid but never overblown narrative style; I also expected the plot would be complex yet readily comprehensible and her main characters believable and sympathetic with flashes of wry humor, which proved true on all counts. But I thought myself very clever for anticipating where the plot was going and what was "really" up with some of the characters -- and I show more was wrong, wrong, WRONG. There's a twist about halfway through the story that made me literally drop the book and scream right out loud with the delicious shock of it -- and yet it didn't come out of left field, it was perfectly set up. I love books that play (or prey) on my expectations like that, so I have to give Claudia Gray big kudos for this one.Evernight is the first in a series of four, and I can't wait to see how the next part of the story develops! show less