Turned ~ Morgan Rice review

Turned (Book #1)
Morgan Rice Books
March 10, 2011 (paperback)
196 pages
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I've seen the Turned series on both LibraryThing's (Member) and Goodreads giveaway pages but didn't win any of them so I never read them. When my library's Overdrive got the ebooks, though, I decided to give them a try and read Turned the first book in the series.

In this first book, Caitlin Paine has just moved and it's her first day at her new school. The New York City school with its metal detectors, security guards, and tough kids is unlike anything she's used to even after all the moves her (much) less than stellar mother has put Caitlin and her younger brother Sam through.

It's on that first day that she meets Jonah, seemingly the only good thing about her new school - and new locale. Before things can really begin between them, however, Caitlin feels herself changing. Feels of superhuman strength overcome her - leaving her feeling not only stronger than she's ever felt, but also craving violence and, strangely, to feed.

Caitlin doesn't understand these feelings . . . or the whole new world they'll soon lead her into.


Turned is short (196 pages in paperback) and seems much more like an introduction to the series than anything else. We get to meet Caitlin and Jonah and learn some of the back story about the vampires but nothing is examined very closely (Caitlin's past, why they move so often, her relationship with her family, the friends from her past, etc). We get a lot of surface things.

Reading the series as a whole or if this had been part of a larger novel, it might have been a smaller issue but with this being the whole story, I was left wondering some things.

The school setting as well as Caitlin's home life seemed almost too harsh. While we didn't see a lot of things (again, this being short and that only being a part of it), it felt almost beyond belief that no one in the whole city (at least that we saw) besides Caitlin, her brother, and Jonah was decent.

I did find Jonah to be a really interesting character and I liked the vampire lore that was introduced. I'm interested to see how things develop in the second book and how/if it builds on what was presented in this opener to the series.

Rating: 6/10


Other books you might like: A Beautiful Dark by Jocelyn Davies and The Tear Collector by Patrick Jones