336 pages
St Martin's Griffin
St Martin's Griffin
August 3, 2010
Buy @ Amazon
Infinite Days flips the basic premise of most vampire stories on its head. Lenah Beaudonte, the main character is a vampire who wants to become human. Not because she's no good at being a
vampire--she's been actually rather good at it for going on five centuries now--and not because she doesn't enjoy the violence--she most definitely does. So, there's an actually evil vampire who becomes human to start out the whole story.
The process to make Lenah human requires one hundred years of hibernation so along with adjusting to being human, she also has to adjust to the new century. And high school as her new place of residence is a boarding school to keep her safe from her coven that doesn't know she's now human.
Give her a friend, a fascination with the most popular boy in school, the danger of keeping herself secret from the aforementioned coven and Infinite Days, the first in a series by debut author Rebecca Maizel is born.
Infinite Days has a very unique premise even just considering that most books/television shows/movies feature either humans wanting to become vampires or vampires that have somehow become very disenchanted with the everything involved in being a vampire (blood, violence, etc) and want to be human. While Lenah had become disenchanted, it wasn't that she was some weak vampire or one who didn't partake in (possibly more than) her fair share of violence.
She also didn't spend all of her time as a human depressed over the lives she'd ended as a vampire (and I'm not sure if that was one hundred percent a good thing--how absolutely that didn't weigh on her).There was a lot that was new to Lenah given that she had been out of the world for a century and at times it was interesting to see her reintroduced to society and experience things. Some of the things she was supposed to know-schoolwise, however, I did find implausible given both her century absence and lack of exposure to current innovations/changes in grammar, etc.Rhode, the vampire who made Lenah, and the one who helped her become human, seemed to be too little a part of the story--for me, at least. I thought Lenah moved on from him very quickly from how much a part of her life he had been. That may have just been a part of my larger issue with the whole book, though. I thought of the whole novel, the interpersonal relationships were the weak point. The one between Lenah and Justin seemed to develop really quickly-and I never quite understood the why. And none of the characters' relationships seemed that well developed or written. Maybe it was in how I read it, but I just wanted more between them.
Overall, though, this is a very interesting book and there's a lot about Lenah's life as a vampire told in really great flashbacks that are worked into the story very well. I didn't love this book, but I think I will still read the other books in the series when they do come out because I liked what this one set up and hope that I'll get more from the characters' relationships' next time. (And hey, it's a paperback, too so it's only $9.99, not $17.99)
7/10
(book received through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers)
Buy @ Amazon
Infinite Days flips the basic premise of most vampire stories on its head. Lenah Beaudonte, the main character is a vampire who wants to become human. Not because she's no good at being a
vampire--she's been actually rather good at it for going on five centuries now--and not because she doesn't enjoy the violence--she most definitely does. So, there's an actually evil vampire who becomes human to start out the whole story.The process to make Lenah human requires one hundred years of hibernation so along with adjusting to being human, she also has to adjust to the new century. And high school as her new place of residence is a boarding school to keep her safe from her coven that doesn't know she's now human.
Give her a friend, a fascination with the most popular boy in school, the danger of keeping herself secret from the aforementioned coven and Infinite Days, the first in a series by debut author Rebecca Maizel is born.
Infinite Days has a very unique premise even just considering that most books/television shows/movies feature either humans wanting to become vampires or vampires that have somehow become very disenchanted with the everything involved in being a vampire (blood, violence, etc) and want to be human. While Lenah had become disenchanted, it wasn't that she was some weak vampire or one who didn't partake in (possibly more than) her fair share of violence.
She also didn't spend all of her time as a human depressed over the lives she'd ended as a vampire (and I'm not sure if that was one hundred percent a good thing--how absolutely that didn't weigh on her).There was a lot that was new to Lenah given that she had been out of the world for a century and at times it was interesting to see her reintroduced to society and experience things. Some of the things she was supposed to know-schoolwise, however, I did find implausible given both her century absence and lack of exposure to current innovations/changes in grammar, etc.Rhode, the vampire who made Lenah, and the one who helped her become human, seemed to be too little a part of the story--for me, at least. I thought Lenah moved on from him very quickly from how much a part of her life he had been. That may have just been a part of my larger issue with the whole book, though. I thought of the whole novel, the interpersonal relationships were the weak point. The one between Lenah and Justin seemed to develop really quickly-and I never quite understood the why. And none of the characters' relationships seemed that well developed or written. Maybe it was in how I read it, but I just wanted more between them.
Overall, though, this is a very interesting book and there's a lot about Lenah's life as a vampire told in really great flashbacks that are worked into the story very well. I didn't love this book, but I think I will still read the other books in the series when they do come out because I liked what this one set up and hope that I'll get more from the characters' relationships' next time. (And hey, it's a paperback, too so it's only $9.99, not $17.99)
7/10
(book received through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers)
Thanks for the review. I'm thinking of purchasing this.
ReplyDelete