Review: Marked - P.C. Cast, Kristin Cast

Title: Marked (House of Night #1)
Author: P.C. Cast, Kristin Cast
Published: May 1st 2006 by St. Martin's Griffin
Add It: Goodreads
Purchase: Amazon, Barnes and Noble
Rating: 2 stars

Summary from goodreads: The House of Night series is set in a world very much like our own, except in 16-year-old Zoey Redbird's world, vampyres have always existed.  In this first book in the series, Zoey enters the House of Night, a school where, after having undergone the Change, she will train to become an adult vampire -- that is, if she makes it through the Change.  Not all of those who are chosen do.  It's tough to begin a new life, away from her parents and friends, and on top of that, Zoey finds she is no average fledgling.  She has been Marked as special by the vampyre Goddess, Nyx.  But she is not the only fledgling at the House of Night with special powers.  When she discovers that the leader of the Dark Daughters, the school's most elite club, is misusing her Goddess-given gifts, Zoey must look deep within herself for the courage to embrace her destiny--with a little help from her new vampyre friends.
                      

What I think: In total I found about 10 reviews about this book with more than 4 stars. It's kind of sad because it really has potential, as a fantasy lover I like a new look on different worlds. This book promised me that I would be learning about a whole new kind of vampire and how older vampires teach them how to survive there fledgling period (this is a period of 4 years where a human makes the transition to vampire) and become a good adult vampire. Kind of like the Vampire Academy series by Richelle Mead.. 

During the whole book Zoey is called special, it's almost every 5 pages so it's not more than normal that I wanted something 'special' to happen in this book. I can warn you right now, this will not happen. Our main character Zoey also has some other less appealing characteristics she is very judgmental for example. She even dared to tell us that one guy in the book was mean and weird when she did not even speak with him. 

Then there are these other persons who are offended on race, gender, weight, sexuality and so on throughout the book. Women for example are called a slut if they wear skirts that are in her opinion a bit to short or if they only think about kissing a boy. One of her friends is gay and the writers keep reminding us every time we see his name. Also all religious people are bananas, they are totally nuts and always wrong. Zoey also seems to have this weird thing with anorexia, everyone who is only a bit skinny is called out to have this horrible decease. The bad thing is that she talks about this if it is a certain choice these people made and that they are probably really happy about it themselves. 

Something else that I found really annoying were all the corrections in the vocabulary, really why try to use all these really hard words (they definitely used a lot of Thesaurus writing this book). When on the other hand they use words as 'poopie' and 'boobie', come on how old are the characters supposed to be again?

I could go on and on about some of the other details but that would become a whole book on its own. I still doubt if I shall read the next book in the series, because what I said earlier; the story line has its potential. It could have been a really good book but the writers put too much of their own opinion in there which made the story more about them hating a lot of things than Zoey finding herself in becoming a vampire.

One last remark; since when do we write vampire as vampyre? Is this some new kind of spelling that no one told me about? To all of you who also didn't know about this, I looked it up on Thesaurus and they also have no definition for the word. It's probably just some old kind of spelling that I didn't know about.