Both of these are from the same series, and I read them both in the same day, so I’m just going to do a double review instead of one for each.
From the publisher:
In the Forest of the Night:
I was born to the name of Rachel Weatere in the year 1684, more than three hundred years ago.
The one who changed me named me Risika, and Risika I became, though I never asked what it meant. I continue to call myself Risika, even though I was transformed into what I am against my will.
By day, Risika sleeps in a shaded room in Concord, Massachusettts. By night, she hunts the streets of New York City. She is used to being alone.
But now someone is following Risika. Someone has left her a black rose, the same sort of rose that sealed her fate three hundred years ago.
Three hundred years ago Risika had a family — a brother and a sister who loved her. Three hundred years ago she was human.
Now she is a vampire, a powerful one. And her past has come back to torment her.
This atmospheric, haunting tale marks the stunning debut of a promising fourteen-year-old novelist.
Demon in My View:
Seventeen-year-old Jessica Allodola discovers that the vampire world of her fiction is real when she develops relationships with an alluring vampire named Aubrey and the teenage witch who is trying to save Jessica from his clutches.
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I found this series when I was still in middle school and I read it because I loved vampires even then. I wasn’t crazy about the stories, but I remember that I was incredibly impressed with the fact that she was 13/14 when she wrote the first novel, and I was pissed that I didn’t have a novel published. Ever since then I’ve had this need to be published as soon as possible…but that’s a different story.
These books are for teens (and tweens) by a teenager, and it really shows. The first book in the series, In the Forests of the Night is just okay. Atwater-Rhodes does a good job of outlining her personal vampire lore, but at the same time it seems like she spews all the information out too quickly. There’s no mystery, no reveal. A lot of the time while I was reading I thought, “Why should I be interested in this person? This book doesn’t really do a good job of telling me that.” The names of the characters are sometimes unnecessarily exotic. I understand the need to be original, but it gets annoying when some characters have regular names and random characters have overly exotic names. I think what bothered me the most is the name of the main character, Risika. Never was the point of her name change explained or even addressed. I personally would have enjoyed the book more if she retained Rachel as her name.
The book explores Risika’s human past and her vampire present. The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a reason for the telling, there’s just the telling. The main conflict is pretty random. The “villain’s” hate for her is never explained, and since the story is mostly about her, he ends up being a very one-dimensional character. I would have liked to see more depth, and if he was going to be the main villain it would have been nice to know why he hated Risika so much in the first place. It was a quick read, so I can’t complain too much, but I wouldn’t want to read it again and I wouldn’t recommend it. I can’t excuse the lack of depth on the basis of it being a tween/teen book, because Harry Potter books exist, and there’s plenty of complicated stuff in those.
I give this book 2 out of 5 stars.
The second book is about a teenager who finds out what she writes is true. Now, I know that most writers write in order to fulfill their fantasy lives. They want to make themselves into the people they dream of being. There’s nothing wrong with that, I am guilty of living vicariously through my characters. However, this particular plot was so trite that I was annoyed from the beginning to the end. It’s a shame because the explanation for her “ideas” at the end was extremely creative and I really liked it. I just hated the way the book treated it. I was especially appalled by the fact that the author has vampires going to high school. It just didn’t make sense to me at all. I felt like she couldn’t decide whether she wanted her vampires to be more ruthless or more emotional. In the first book, Aubrey is villainous and one-dimensional. In the second book he’s at best two dimensional, but still none of his characteristics (good or bad) seem believable.
The “demon” of the title is non-existent in the book. Another thing that bothers me about both books is that there aren’t any logical limits to Atwater-Rhodes’ vampires. *spoiler alert* They can go out whenever they want, they are unharmed by everything but “magicked” knives, they can shape shift, they can teleport, among many other things. In my opinion, when a character has too much power he or she becomes boring. There aren’t any obstacles, and without obstacles you can’t have an interesting book because you always know how things are going to end. The ending to this book was extremely predictable, as was the ending to the first book.
I will admit that I have a hard-wired belief that vampires are not to be subjected to teenage foolishness (which is why I refuse to read that Twilight crap), so I may be biased on this point in the case of the second book. However, even given my bias, it is undeniable that the plot is contrived and predictable, and that none of the characters have enough depth to make you really care about them. Is depth really too much to ask for? If it is, then we need to raise our standards, teen literature or not.
I give this book 1 out of 5 stars (I can’t give it 0 because it did have some creativity)
I would not recommend either of the books to anyone over the age of 15, or anyone who likes depth in their books. After reading these two books again, I also realized that I was happy that I didn’t get anything published at such a young age. I would have not been able to write for the audience I wanted (meaning my books would have been relegated to teen fiction) and I would have been pigeonholed into a genre for which I did not want to write. It is also likely that I would have been encouraged to dumb down, and that is a cardinal sin in my book, and impossible for me to do.
Have you read In the Forests of the Night or Demon in My View? Tell me what you think. If you haven’t read it, does my review influence your desire to read it in any way? What would you have liked me to include? Let me know!
The Haughty Bibliophile 