Marked by: P.C. Cast & Kristin Cast

Series: House of Night (book 1)

Challenges: TBR Challenge

Published: 2007

# of pages: 306


My quest for a vampire book besides Twilight to recommend to my teenage sister continues! The idea behind this book was a great one. However, with all of the bad language and bad attitudes in this book, I won't be telling my sister or any other teenage girl about this one. The writing style was also annoying. The authors included parentheses throughout the narrative with their own opinions. Thankfully these opinions are good (for example, doing drugs is bad, sleeping around is bad, starving yourself is bad, etc). Apparently using the F work repeatedly is not bad though. The authors tried too hard to make this a teenage book and it came off sounding forced.

The only good things about the book is that it had a fairly unique storyline (although they borrowed some parts from the movie "Mean Girls", including a gay guy named Damien and the whole lunchroom scene) and the protagonist does become a little more serious and grown up towards the end of the novel. Thankfully the "Mean Girls" scenes didn't continue throughout the book. I was afraid it would be a retelling of that movie for awhile there.

Overall, I wouldn't recommend this book to young adults because of the bad language and sexual content and I wouldn't recommend it to adults because of the annoying teenage attitudes among other things.