Book Review: House of Night-Marked

TITLE: Marked
PART IN SERIES: First in the House of Night series
AUTHOR: P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast
PUBLISHED 2007
GENRE: Young adult, vampires, series, drama
PREMISE: Zoey's life changes forever when she is chosen as a vampire fledgling and sent to the notorious school: House of Night.
MY REVIEW: I was intrigued by these books for the longest time (those covers are cool) but like Wicked Lovely I was put off by the comparisons to Twilight. But since Wicked Lovely was a success I've decided to give all the suposed Twilight wannabes a try. Having finished it, I think this both is and isn't a Twilight wannabe. But I enjoyed this way more then I did Twilight...however, I didn't enjoy it enough to classify it as a good book.
The good stuff: the concept is very cool. Come on, a vampire high school? Who wouldn't want to read about that? The banter between Zoey's friends is also highly entertaining and just made the book for me. I adore Damien and the Twins. The gothic setting and feel of the book is great and some of the magic intriguing (am I right in thinking this is a heavy Wiccan based book? I'm not Wiccan so I don't know for sure...). It was also nice that for a change romance wasn't the whole focus of the story.
Sadly, all that is washed away by the fact that the writers seem stuck in what I like to call Special Person Syndrome (SPS for short). Special Person Syndrome is what I call those books where the main character is special already, then discovers she/he has gifts that make them more special, wherean they go to land/area whatever full of special people, where of course they are also special THERE, and it all leads to them becoming SUPER special. You've all read books like this and while there's not neccessarily anything wrong with it, it makes for a very predictable plot. I called the ending to this book when she got invited to that Dark Sisters thing by Aphrodite.
This is the main problem with the book. That and Zoey...was a frusterating character, mostly because she didn't seem to HAVE a character. Her thoughts never really seemed to have rhyme or reason to them and the only thing about her personality that I got was she liked history and even that didn't really make sense. There are also stereotypes up the wazoo and Zoey's snarky comments about every little thing got annoying very fast.
So while the book was severely lacking, it wasn't completely horrible. Like I said, there were moments I enjoyed. The ending is also kind of intriguing because there seems to be something building (I hope there is something building anyway, otherwise these books are pretty pointless) and so I will be picking up the rest of it.
WHO SHOULD READ: Twilight fans, vampire fans, you want a new guilty pleasure series to read
MY RATING: Three out of Five vampires