Gray, Claudia - Evernight

[oyceter]

First off, it would be nice if publishers made it explicit when a book is the first of a series, not a stand alone!

Bianca Olivier's parents have decided to enroll her in prestigious Evernight Academy, an elite boarding school that naturally hides dark secrets among its Gothic arches and gargoyles. She feels dowdy and lacking compared to the "Evernight types," who seem to vacation in the Swiss Alps or the Bermudas and have their uniforms tailored by fashion designers, and she's irresistably drawn toward troublemaker Lucas, who warns her to stay away from him, as he'll only cause trouble for her.

So far, switch out some names, and this could be just about any YA vampire novel out there (I say, probably having read 75% of them as a teen). Then things don't quite go as expected. And then they sort of do. It feels a lot like Gray wanted to subvert all sorts of YA vampire tropes but stay within the tropes to get the same payoff, and it just doesn't work for me.

Oh, and skip the prologue, which adds nothing.

Spoilers

I was laughing in the beginning because I could tick off all the tropes: 1) I have red hair and pale skin and am ugly!, 2) the in crowd, 3) The Boy, 4) the boy who's perfect on the outside but maybe not on the inside, 5) the outcasts who become the heroine's friends, and 6) The Ball!

And then it turns out the Bianca's the vampire and Lucas is her prey, which I had not expected at all, even though people told me the book was going to do something different. I love how the middle section fliips the standard coding of the YA vampire novel: Lucas is the one who's vulnerable to Bianca, she's the one who must control herself for fear of hurting him, for all that he tries to protect her, she's the one he needs protection from. It's great. And I love the way her family unit works and everything.

Plus, the idea behind Evernight is brilliant; every time I read a YA vampire book, I wonder why a 200-year-old vampire would ever want to go through high school again. And it makes sense here! It's because they're so out of touch with technology and the modern world that they have to go back to school!

On a side note, I had a moment of "bzuh?" when Bianca's 900+ year old father said the ages 12-18 were sucky no matter what time you were in, since I am fairly sure teenager-ness was a recently invented concept and that a 16-year-old in Europe in the 1100s probably would be pretty past teen angst, since a) no concept of teen and b) he or she would probably be treated as adult by then.

Unfortunately, some of this was undercut by my feeling that Gray had cheated. It's hard pulling this kind of reveal with first-person POV, and I don't think it works here. I can for some other books I've read, largely because the protagonist is in an unfamiliar setting, but things like Bianca glossing over the glasses of blood at the breakfast table just didn't work for me. Still, it was an interesting enough twist to keep reading.

But then, Lucas turns out to be a vampire hunter, and he's pretty powerful now too, thanks to Bianca's bites, and the book goes straight back into standard YA vampire fare, complete with star-crossed, forbidden romance and all. Maybe that wouldn't have annoyed me so much had Lucas-as-vampire-hunter not completely undercut a lot of the prior undercutting. Once again, he's the bad boy, he's dangerous to her, he's powerful and has scary secrets and knows about a world that threatens her. So yeah, not sure if I'll keep reading the series if it sticks with the Bianca-Lucas thing, just because I am rather bored by them.

Balthazar and Raquel, on the other hand, I like a whole lot.

A very interesting premise, but I think the execution falls down.

Links:
- madeleinmae's review (non-spoilery)
- sarahtales' review (non-spoilery)

Comments

[deepad]

Yeah, I was disappointed too, especially since her fanfic is so good. I spotted the main plot twist pretty early on, so it wasn't a surprise for me, and all the angst in the end just seemed hokey and overdrawn.

[penmage.livejournal.com]

I was pleased as punch about the twist, and I almost feel like that clouded me. I was reading happily along, going "cliche! cliche! cliche!" and then she turned it all on its head, so I think I was more impressed by it than I should have been on writing alone.

Where does she write fanfic?

[deepad]

Um... I'm not sure she wants to publically link her fic identity with her pro one, so you could comment on her claudiagrey LJ and ask her?

[penmage.livejournal.com]

Nah, that's all right. I don't want to make her feel uncomfortable by asking. You said it like it was public knowledge, so I assumed that it was.

[deepad]

Yeah, I know she acknowledges writing fanfic as a pro writer, so she probably wouldn't mind. I just wouldn't want to cross a line by being the one to post about it here.

Sorry, in hindsight I should have been more discrete in my comment.

[oyceter]

I think I was more iffy about the execution of the twist (first-person POV!), but I love love love the idea of it. I just wish she'd stuck with that instead of going back to the rivals/star-crossed thing.

[oyceter]

*nods* Yeah... I think if I had read it without the twist, I might even have enjoyed it more and wallowed in the YA vampire-ness of it all, but then there was the twist and I thought it would run with that, and then it returned to YA vampire-ness and totally confused me.

[quadrifons.livejournal.com]

I wonder why a 200-year-old vampire would ever want to go through high school again.

Immortal beings perpetually repeating high school for no reason other than eventually meeting their twu wuv is one of my biggest peeves in supernatural fiction!

...And the thought of technologically-impaired vampires amuses me more than it probably should.

[oyceter]

Hee! You'd probably very much enjoy the scene when the vampire from the Middle Ages encounters the iPod: "Do the spirits in the metal make it work?"

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

...okay, that's kind of awesome.

[oyceter]

That may have been one of my favorite parts in the book.

[ionescribens.livejournal.com]

I liked the dad's comment about teens, as given teen actions through history, if you survived your teens (and disease didn't get you) you usually had an okay life. But there is a reason Shakespeare made Romeo and Juliet and Mercutio, etc, teens. The father, keeping up with the times, would know both modern psych and history.

The end stuff (to avoid spoilers) didn't bother me once I shifted myself into my fourteen/fifteen year old headspace. Then of course the dynamics just had to be that way. Some of the YAs out there are clever but I don't know that teens are their real audience. (I'd love to find out if teens, and not college girls, are reading Wilce, for example.) But this one seems genuinely teen.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

It's funny, but Flora Segunda strikes me as something that might appeal a lot to advanced pre-teen readers. But maybe a little twee for older teens. It was a little twee for me, though like most adult readers, I liked the worldbuilding and the non-twee aspects of the voice.

[oyceter]

*nods* That's true. And I don't know as much about psych and history so am mostly guessing on what I do know.

I think I would not have been as bothered by the end stuff had the middle stuff not shifted me out of my teen headspace; otherwise, I would have just gone along, laughed a little at the tropes, and wallowed in the angst of it all and enjoyed it thoroughly. But because of the twist, I feel like my expectations shifted, and then they had to be shifted back, so it felt like a bit of a cheat.

I have no idea about some YAs... I suspect I would have loved Dessen as a teen, but when I was a teen, I was actually skipping a lot of the YA stuff and going for adult fantasy (there wasn't as much teen fantasy then). Although I definitely devoured LJ Smith and Christopher Pike.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Good point about the middle and the shift in head space.

[mattador.livejournal.com]

I'm definitely willing to continue reading the series as more came out, and the premise still makes me grin a couple months after reading it, but the prose and the execution were a little bit of a letdown.

[oyceter]

*nods* Yeah.. I think I will wait to see other reports on the latter books and see if they're more along the lines of the middle part (which I enjoyed) or the beginning and end parts (which I am not very interested in).

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Occasionally a Big Reveal from a first-person narrator will work for me... you've read Megan Whalen Turner's "The Thief," right? A lot of people felt cheated by that, but I thought it was totally within the boundaries that the book had initially set out.

Evernight, though... I don't think that particular twist worked for me. Right there, it lost me, and never got me back.

[oyceter]

Yes, definitely! Turner's was the one I was thinking of. And I know a lot of people think that's a cheat, and I do think it partly is a cheat, but there's the benefit of the need to deceive everyone instead of just one or two people, and the fact that it's in an unfamiliar setting for the protag.

Whereas this one makes the shift, and then suddenly you see her entire every day life after, and I'm just thinking, "Well, why did you not think about this before, aside from fooling the reader?"

[maerhys.livejournal.com]

Agreed! I read it when it came out - review under the tag - and was pretty meh on it. Twilight goes to Hogwarts is how I summed it up.

[oyceter]

Hee! Yeah, pretty much. I mean, I did like the middle bits, but the gothic bits totally did not work for me.

ETA: Also, would you mind my linking to your review?

[maerhys.livejournal.com]

Here you go: Evernight review (http://madeleinemae.livejournal.com/394789.html).

[oyceter]

Thank you, and linked!

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

I was all set to comment that yeah, the reveal hadn't worked for me, either, but then I looked back at my bookpost and realized I hadn't even gotten that far!

http://buymeaclue.livejournal.com/566596.html

ETA: Oops, I misunderstood: the twist did work for you, but the fallout didn't work well enough. I didn't get that far, either! I am overusing exclamation points this ayem! Here, have several for your own use!!!!

[oyceter]

Hee! I can always use extra exclamations!

I think the only reason I made it through the first part was because I knew there was some sort of twist coming, so I could laugh at all the tropes that were being set in place. Because you really can tick them off!

[octopedingenue]

I gave up on the book soon after the Bianca reveal, since I couldn't shake the feeling she'd cheated. I might've been more forgiving of Bianca not thinking to herself pre-reveal "As I know Bob, I am a vampire (and therefore not the person the reader thinks I am)" more if post-reveal she and everyone hadn't switched to thinking VAMPIRE VAMPIRE VAMPIRE about it all the time. Much better handled, sans vampires, in Whalen's The Thief (and WITH vampires in Vampire Knight).

I briefly considered skipping the rest of the book and going on to book 2 'cause I had the ARC, but reading its back I wound up confused because none of the names seemed the same!

[oyceter]

Icon love!

Definitely agree re: the cheat! And unlike the Turner, there's no reason for Bianca to conceal it from 90% of the people in the book. And there's the "Oh, by the way, while I was drinking my normal glass of blood for breakfast," where I keep thinking, "Well, why didn't you mention it before? Or if it's so unremarkable that you don't need to mention it, why are you mentioning it now?"

Huh, who are the names in book 2? I totally want a book with just Balthazar and Raquel now. I liked Balthazar a lot and felt really bad for him, because Lucas seems like a jerk.

[octopedingenue]

There are few things that entertain me as much as Vampires! With Guns!

Exactly. Had Bianca not realized she was a vampire or similar, that would be different, but as it was I felt like "Oh how CONVEEEEENIENT that the only interesting domestica bits you felt like sharing about your daily life until now were the non-vampire ones! And now those are uninteresting to you again!"

I can't find the summary I read before and of course I've packed the book off on Bookmooch and can't read it now, but I swear there was a different name somewhere. Do Bianca or Lucas go by or change their names to something different at any point in Evernight? I dropped the book long before that, so it's possible I'm just losing my mind.

[oyceter]

I, er, sadly do not remember if they do change names or not. I think they might in the very end to write sekrit letters to each other, but that's more a stealth thing and shouldn't make it onto back cover copy....

[octopedingenue]

And sadly, no, Balthazar and Raquel weren't the protagonists at any rate, because I definitely remember reading about vampire/vampire-hunter romaaaaance and I'm like "Wait, there's another romance like that now?" (I meant other than Bianca/Lucas, because of the name(s?) difference, if there was one and I wasn't just confused and/or so little impressed by Bianca/Lucas that I actually forgot their names.

I just finished The Dragon Waiting by John M. Ford today and understood very very little of it and will have to come back to it when I have a PhD-level understanding of British history, but overall I would like the incomparably understated German physicist-cum-vampire Gregory von Bayern to stare over his glasses at Bianca and Edward Cullen until they writhe with embarrassment.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Oh, please please please please please write it up! Even if it's just scattered notes! I love that book and I don't understand it either and I want to discuss it!

[octopedingenue]

I did find this annotations website that looks promising!

[oracne.livejournal.com]

I am definitely curious about the sequel to EVERNIGHT, to see in which direction she goes.

[oyceter]

Me too, although I may wait to see what the flist thinks before getting it. Unless I just get it at the library, yay libraries!

Feel free to delete this comment if you wish

[sajia.livejournal.com]

I recently posted the beginnings of a novel in my livejournal, "The Misadventures of Marium Shujan". It's Hogwarts as a music college, set in a futuristic Vancouver, called Neovan, where magic and technology coexist. It's friends-locked, but since you're on my f-list you should be able to access it. I'll be posting more once I finish cleaning the house and doing the laundry.

Re: Feel free to delete this comment if you wish

[oyceter]

Thanks for the link, and that sounds awesome! I'll try to read it if I have time, although I'm not sure if I will, given grad school =(.

[sarahtales.livejournal.com]

Oh, I has a review, she says helpfully!

http://sarahtales.livejournal.com/115218.html#cutid2

I liked it more than you did, but then I am easy for a good makeout scene with unusual power dynamics.

(Also, happy Christmas. :))

[oyceter]

Ooo thanks for the link!