House of Night Series by P.C. & Kristin Cast

House of Night (Books 1-5)

Author(s): P.C. & Kristin Cast

First Book Published 2007

Titles in Series: Marked, Betrayed, Chosen, Untamed, Hunted, Tempted, Burned, Awakened, Destroyed

Published by St. Martin's Griffin

Overall Series Rating: 1.5/5 stars

My Review:

This review is for books one to five of the House of Night series. I just do not have the energy to write five different reviews for each of these books. I also will not be re-visiting these books or attempting to carry them on.

The House of Night series is about Zoey Redbird, who lives in our modern day world, but in a world where vampires exist. (Sorry, vampyres. I'm not spelling it wrong.) When she is marked as a fledgling vampyre, she is sent to the House of Night, where she befriends other fledgling vampyres, flirts around with a lot of guys and grows as a teenage vampyre. But she's a special fledgling, not an average one, with exceptional powers. She has to indure betrayals, loss, and blah blah blah.

Sorry. I just did not want to go on with a summary and since I didn't even like this series, I am fine with not finishing my summary properly. All five of these books were, at times, hard to get through, but I did finish them all. (Though I won't be reading the rest of the series.) But I found them terrible, and for many reasons.

Number one, the writing. Every single page......EVERY. SINGLE. PAGE. Bugged. Me. Seriously, the writing is bad. I mean no disrespect to the authors at all, but this book is so full of slang terms, abbreviations and bad language it made me want to knock my head against a wall. Books I read don't have to be dripping with elegant and unusal words and very "proper" english language-I enjoyed Twilight- but I don't want to feel like I learned something wrong in school. (Should proper writing be like this?) I feel as if I am losing a good chunk of brain cells reading these books. I don't care if you wanted to make it "hip" and "cool" for teens. I'm a teen, and I don't want to read trashy writing like this. 

Next, the characters. I have never come across such a 2-D and shallow bunch of characters. I felt as if everyone did not have any personality. Each character is shallow and simple minded. I found myself quite exasperated and tired of all their whiny little problems. Zoey's the worst, and I mean THE WORST, role model and main character I have ever seen. She has no sense of character, no sense of pride, no sense of honor. Having three boyfriends is not cool. No matter how many times you said "I can't help it," didn't make it any better. Don't get into that situation in the first place. Your group of friends were right to ditch you. Zoey Redbird is also the biggest hypocrite I have ever seen. As for the other characters, let me just say, they were complete jerks. I'm gonna wrap up by saying that there seemed to be zero effort on the characterization.

I like vampires. (Or vampyres.) I was fascinated by the elemental aspect of vampyres in these novels, but I thought it wasn't carried out well. Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy novels definitely were better in the element aspect.

The only reason this series gets a .5 added onto the one was because of the plot. There were some semi-entertaining twists here and there, though my favorite was Loren getting nailed to a fence and staked. (I disliked him a lot.)

So why did I read all five books? If you've seen my comments on Goodreads about this series, you will probably be surprised about my obvious disgust in it. I think I maskd how much I disliked the series, but after thinking about them for a while, re-reading bits, I realized how bad they actually were. Was I expecting them to get better? Yes. Too bad they didn't.