Huh! Just when I'd figured out how to see who'd been kind enough to rate my reviews, ciao's managed ...
Huh! Just when I'd figured out how to see who'd been kind enough to rate my reviews, ciao's managed to make my new reviews say 'this review has not yet been rated'!!! SORT IT OUT CIAO!
Member since:23.07.2009
Reviews:77
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Chosen is the third book in P.C. and Kristin Cast's House of Night saga.. I bought my copy for £4.89 new from Amazon, but the jacket price is £6.99, as with most books now, if you shop around you are pretty much guaranteed to get a deal on it. At present the first five books are available, the sixth (Tempted) is due for paperback release on October 27th 2009, but doesn't seem to be being released in hardback. A seventh book, Burned, has been announced with an expected release date of May 2010.
**History and background**
This is another saga of teenage/young adult vampire fiction, a genre which regularly comes back into vogue. Cast seems to have piggybacked on the huge success of the Harry Potter series, and I suppose possibly on the Stephanie Meyer Twilight saga which were written earlier than House of Night. This isn't a criticism, I am a big believer in the adage of if it ain't broke don't fix it; if there is a current trend and you are confident that your work is sufficiently different to make it succeed then jump on the bandwagon.
House of Night is
PC Cast's third saga. Her previous writings were the Goddess Summoning and Partholon sagas. The series was begun in 2005, with Marked being published in 2007 by Martins. There have been two books a year since 2007.
**Plot***
Chosen picks up about a month from where Betrayed left off. Zoey Redbird's birthday is on Christmas Eve, and she hates that people combine birthday and Christmas for her, so when her boyfriend and other friends do so, she ends up having a huge row with her friends.
This row proves to be the start of a decline in her friendships. She is forced to keep a lot of secrets throughout, and although the reader understands why, her friends do not and I find their reaction very predictable, but still feel for Zoey.
Zoey's best friend, Stevie Rae, died in Betrayed, and Zoey found that far from being dead and gone, Stevie Rae and other 'dead' fledglings were living in tunnels under the city of Tulsa, and they were hungry, smelly and generally unpleasant, and they were perfectly happy to kill to satisfy their hunger.
Zoey still saw an element of the old Stevie Rae, though, and with her old enemy's help, Zoey starts to help Stevie Rae; they give her a place to stay, blood, and friendship. After an encounter with the Goddess, Nyx, Zoey becomes convinced that she, with the help of her friends, can bring the old Stevie Rae back. The main problem here is that one of the secrets she's been keeping is of Stevie Rae's being alive!
As well as this story, Zoey's romantic relationships are blossoming. Yes, that should be plural. She has the gorgeous Erik Night, an older fledgling whom she cares for a lot; her human not-so-ex boyfriend, Heath, whom she accidentally imprinted (made him obsessed with her) and with whom she has a long history of on-off love; then there's Professor Loren Blake, vampyre Poet Laureate, who is also gorgeous, and interested, but very much out of bounds. Can this really continue?
**My thoughts and opinions**
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, I read it in 2 days, and only stopped because I noticed the time. I love books that I really can lose myself in, when I was younger I found this easy, but nowadays I rarely find books which are so absorbing, I'll enjoy them, but not in that obsessive way.
Each of the House of night books has a warning on the back stating that they are not suitable for younger readers. This really is true, and this book is the most sexually explicit so far, perhaps a little too much so as it's not just the age group the books are really aimed at (teens, 15 ish) who are going to read them, if you aim at teens, you'll get the younger teens too (13ish) and it is too much for them. I actually like the way that this content is presented, though, to me, it's not just for the sake of it, it emphasises the fact that Zoey is a teenager, facing normal teenage issues, and then on top of that she's got all this responsibility.
My main complaint about the first book was that I didn't find the characters overly well developed, but this improved in the second,and by the end of the third I felt that the characters were very well established, and I like that their actions are much more understandable and, although not predictable, logical.
This book is very America, and the Casts so use a bit of slang which I am not familiar. I don't mind the slang, but I do find that stereotyped Americans are much bitchier and more falsely mature than the children and teens that I know. This was true of this book too.
My main complaint with Chosen was that I found it really obvious from the end of the book that it's part of a series. It's a bit obvious at the beginning, but I think if you hadn't read the others you'd soon get into the story and it wouldn't be an issue. The conclusion, however, isn't overly conclusive, it seems to assume that the reader will go on to read the next book (Untamed), and a lot of loose ends remain such, but I do wonder whether I'd have thought the same had I not know that it was in the middle of a series.
Overall, an enjoyable read, but be aware of the content if you're looking at it for a present!
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I guess it had gone okay with Stevie Rae. I mean she had agreed to meet me tomorrow. And ... more
she hadn't tried to bite me which was a plus. Of course the whole trying-to-eat-the-street-person thing was highly disturbing ... Zoey's best friend Stevie Rae...
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Oct 25th, 2009
very helpful by (100%):
