3.5/5 stars
I never thought that I would actually like a vampire book. The only vampires I have liked are funny sidekick type vampires (and for some reason they tend to be gay). Most vampire books have this mopey girl and this impossibly perfect guy and YAWN...what was I talking about again?
The Immortal Rules wasn't that. I liked the reversal. For a change the girl is the tough kick-ass vampire and the boys get to cope with their feelings. Allie is tough as nails, streetsmart and has lived too much life in too few years. She lives in the Fringes of a vampire city, as an unregistered human with no rights to food, a home or anything else. She's just scraping by scavenging for food and trying to keep her friends alive. Then one day, while protecting her weaker friend, she dies.
Except there's a vampire, and Allie choose immortality over death. Thus begins Allie's second life. She has to learn how to be a vampire and how to cope with being a vampire. She becomes everything she hated, but learns maybe there's more to being a vampire than the soulless killers she imaged. It's up to Allie to "decide what kind of monster she wants to be"
I like the beginning of this book. I like the genre mishmashes. It's vampires with a dose of zombies and post-apocalyptical. The society that Kagawa creates is interesting. She creates a unique vampire lore without ever forgetting that vampires are bloodthirsty monsters.
For me the middle was pretty blah. It turned into another YA camping trip from hell. It seems like almost every heroine roams around in the wilderness for awhile. I understand the purpose that the roaming serves. The problem here is that there's a massive chunk of the book spent roaming around the waste land pretending not to be a vampire. I also found that she stumbled upon a group of travelers who only traveled at night a little too convenient. Yes there was an explanation but it seemed pretty weak to me.
Then the end was action-packed. Kagawa certainly knows how to write fights. Once the story started moving again it moved quickly--life threatening danger, crazy vampires, fighting and tough choices. The beginning and ending were strong in this book. It just felt like the middle dragged.
But I did like it. I liked Allie--she's not a wishy-washy heroine but a fighter with a strong moral compass. Vampire or not, she knows the difference between right and wrong. I like the new spin on vampires and I plan to continue this series.
2 comments:
The genre mishmash is what really got me curious about this book. When I first heard that Julie Kagawa was writing a vampire book I groaned, I was so over vampires. I was done, done, DONE. I had no intentions of reading it. I had loved her Iron Fey series and that was that.
...then the dystopian aspect was mentioned. A vampiric dystopian? Has that ever even been done before? The world as we know it has come to an end and there are blood-suckers about??? The more I thought about it the more I knew I had to give it a try.
It ended up being one of my absolute favorite things. There should definitely be more genre mish-mash. :]
I love it when people play with genres. I get a little leery when I hear people complaining about following the "rules" of a genre. I love it when I can't quite figure out where to shelf a book. YA is so great about mixing genres and it's one of my favorite things about YA.
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