Marked (House of Night, #1)

by P.C. Cast

A kind of nothing story that creates more questions than it answers. I will be fair and say that I'm a bit over the paranormal vampire trend and that could be influencing my review. But also, this was just your run of the mill paranormal vampire book. There wasn't anything special (except for how often they told Zoey how special and different she was) about it.

Zoey is an outsider to her own family when she is tracked and marked as one of the potential vampyres (and the spelling annoyed the crap out of me) destined to attend the House of Night boarding school. Her religious family are horrified and ready to contain her and convert her back (or let her die). FYI, there was a particularly strong slant against Christian/Catholic religion in this, it comes up way more than it needed to be. Anyway, she turns to the only one of her family willing to help her through - her grandma. Her grandma takes her to the school and Zoey finds new friends, new enemies and new dangers as she struggles to learn about what it means to be a vampyre.

Well. For 300+ pages I still know very little about the world Zoey finds herself in. The vampyre change is practically ignored except when necessary to dish out a tiny morsel for Zoey to stress about - oh right, bloodlust, oh right, imprinting, etc. House of Night clearly needed an introductory class for their students and I want to take that up with management. But it also annoyed me that Zoey wasn't more proactive in finding out what the hell was going on. As far as the timeline, it felt like she was only there for a week or two, so I guess she was busy. Especially with her always being on the soapbox - there was a lot of preaching about stereotyping and kindness and religion and race and lgbt+ and it felt like it missed the mark on educating versus lecturing.

But the biggest problem with this book was I just didn't care. I didn't like Zoey or her friends or her enemies. I didn't like the plot. I didn't like the numerous questions I had about the world building that just weren't answered. It was very flat and bland and I just couldn't be bothered. I won't be reading the rest of the series so I guess my questions will have to go unanswered. 1.5 stars, rounded down to 1.