Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Page Count: 287
Rating: 4/5
It was the year of disappearances. The honeybees were the first to go.
Ariella Montero is no stranger to the dark side of life. Half human, half vampire, she spent her first thirteen years in exile from both societies. When her best friend was murdered, Ari ran away to begin a new life in Florida. But, one by one, the people and things she cares most about keep disappearing. And Ari may be next.
She can hypnotize, she can read minds, and she can make herself invisible, but can she escape her stalkers? Ari’s special talents are severely tested as she moves on — from a vampire community in the Sunshine State to college in Georgia to the primeval maze of the Okefenokee Swamp. In contending with the politics of vampire and human cultures, Ari comes face-to-face with zombies that are infiltrating America, as well as demons and shadows that haunt us all.
I just want to thank a friend of mine for letting me borrow this book, because I don’t think I’d have been able to read it otherwise…I could never find it. Anyway to the review.
I adore this series, and it’s mainly because it’s so different then the other young adult vampire novels. I mean it’s almost completely different. There is no stupid immature love triangle, there is no childish whining, and there is no set bad guy. The main character, Ari, is wonderful. She’s a true thinker and very smart, and she’s not out to save the world single-handily. She and the other characters are wonderful and there is a fair amount of character development over the course of the book. You can tell a fair amount of research goes into this series and Hubbard practically paints a world in a classical kind of way. It’s refreshing to see something that’s actually plausible and well thought out, not to mention the author has the ability to truly write. Being the second in the series it has the same feel as the first and even though it took me a good amount of time to find this book it wasn’t hard at all to get back into it. I’ll admit the plot is odd because it doesn’t flow like so many other books out there of this nature, and at times it can seem “plot-less” but despite that it was still intriguing and there was enough going on that I wanted to see how it turned out. I also enjoy having a “bad-guy” that’s hard to figure out and isn’t extremely frustrating.
I really wish that more people knew about this series and that it would get more attention. It’s beautifully written and it’s a refreshing change to all the “boy-problem” books. (There are boy problems, but it’s not like the rest where it takes the absolute for-front to her life and it’s quite a different problem). Overall these are mature books, not in the R rated sense but in the sense that it has a mature attitude. I definitely recommend this book and it’s predecessor The Society of S.
In Libris Veritas 