Real Durn Hot and Done Woke Up- Books 7 & 8 of the House of Night series
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
OK boys and girls. You know the spiel. This series is awful, horribly written, tacky, unoriginal to the point of rip off, a bad representation of teenagers, overly promiscuous, pointless, offensive to just about every culture, religion, minority and lifestyle, and would probably make a great MTV mini series AND I FREAKIN' LOVE IT. So let's just dive right in.
If you aren't this far in the series, skip this because it contains spoilers. Oh and it's incredibly offensive.
When we last left off, Zoey Lady-of-the-Night-is-another-name-for-whore Redbird and her trope of vampires, humans, prophets, warriors, undead and the merry men were living it up in Italy, the home of the Vampire Council. Stevie Rae was contemplating bestiality. Aphrodite became unvampired. Zoey broke up with one guy, got with another, dumped him and went back to Heath, and some nuns had stuck it to Nefret and Kalona because in a book about a teenage vampire boarding school, you just gotta have the influence of the Catholic church thrown in there somewhere. OK so now you are up to speed.
I absolutely love this series, in the same way that I love drinking straight from the ice tea jug, turning over couch cushions to hide questionable stains, cheering when something big gets sucked up in the vacuum cleaner and other things that I don't want people to see me doing. It's a guilty pleasure, one I'm almost ashamed to indulge in. I swear, every time I finish a HoN novel, my IQ drops. As I am now 8 books in, I'm to the point of "I know everything there is to know about the shrimpin' business" and I plan on seeing the series all the way through to the end. Not that it ever will. I'll be reading HoN when I'm eighty because when you can mass produce crap like this and make a ton, WHY IN THE WORLD WOULD YOU STOP?
See, you're thinking that all these terrible things I'm saying means that I don't like the series. Please note, the above isn't sarcasm. I truly, to the deep, down, murky, muck filled depths of my black bookish heart, LOVE THIS SERIES.
But that doesn't make my opinion on the content any less true.
Let's move on. You distracted me with your disbelief and it threw me off.
Burned:
Nefret is now the epitome of evil. Having allied herself to Darkness, she has managed to fool people into believing that she is the Goddess Nyx incarnate and that Kalona is none other than Erebus, her consort. Poor Kalona, he only wants Zoey, who is the reincarnation of Aya, the Cherokee maiden who loved and enslaved him centuries ago. Blinded by his single-minded desire for Zoey, and angered by his growing subservience to Nefret, Kalona lashes out and kills someone very dear to Zoey and the loss of her love, shatters her soul. (You're eating this up. Don't deny it.)
With their High Priestess rapidly approaching death, the House of Night fledglings must draw upon forces older and more powerful than they have ever encountered. Aided by an ancient vampire queen, secluded on a Scottish island rich in magic, Stark, now Zoey's sworn warrior and Guardian, embarks on a quest that will allow his soul to follow Zoey's into the Otherworld. It is his hope that once there, he will be able to protect Zoey until her soul can heal from her loss. But Stark isn't the only one who's love can drive him to cross into the world of the dead. Tied to Zoey through death and rebirth, Kalona can't lose the opportunity to find Zoey when she is at her most vulnerable, nor can he ignore Nefret's command to see that she never returns to the realm of the living.
*cue ominous sounding music and smoke machine*
I wasn't expecting to get as broken up as I did over ____'s death. I never really got his relationship with Zoey to begin with and I always thought he was a bit of a goober but I slobbered and snotted all over the place as I read their encounter in the Otherworld, when he finally let her go.
Stark's journey to Scotland and the Sgiach's island was a plot line reaching with the very tip of it's extended pole but it was still different. I'm team Stark all the way so anything that could possibly bring him and Zoey closer is alright with me and boy had to go through hell to get to her. Girl better recognize. Sorry, I slipped into HoNese for a second there. My apologies.
Awakened:
Yeah everybody gets out of bed (and into it) in this book. Zoey wakes up. Stark wakes up. Kalona wakes up. The whole band gets back together and moseys on back to Tulsa, Oklahoma.
So we get back home and SOME ONE ELSE DIES. And it's really sad. And everybody cries. Including me. A lot of really cliche dialogue happens, sprinkled with the various slangs of each HoN member. Nefret resumes her place as High Priestess of the House of Night after having convinced everyone that Kalona made her do all those evil things and that she's all better now. Stevie Rae's imprint with the Raven Mocker Rephaim threatens to come to light, which would make her look as if she's sided with Darkness and thus an enemy of the HoN. All of this was working really well for me but it wasn't until the ending, where Nefret makes a pact with Darkness that would result in a vessel of evil being created that would obey her every command, that I reaffirmed my undying love for this series. The Goddess Nyx seizes an opportunity to help dampen some of the effects that this new puppet of Nefret's will have on the world by placing in it a soul of her own choosing, someone who wants desperately to return to Zoey.
Was the death in this book unnecessary? Yes. Was it someone who really mattered? No. So take heart, dear reader, no one important dies. But it's very sad all the same. One thing I wasn't too keen on in this book was Kalona's becoming an absolute pansy. He's been a pretty scary dude up until this point and now he's doing nothing but whining. I hope to see him make a comeback as the good bad guy in the next book.
Destined, the ninth book in the series is set to come out in November of this year. I can't wait. I've got my beer guzzler helmet and my Nascar t-shirt on and I'm ready for it. Bring it.
In the meantime, here is a lovely picture of DESTIN(ed), FL:
