After Reading

By: Meradeth Houston on 3:38 AM

Infinite Days by Rebecca Maizel

Lenah Beaudonte is, in many ways, your average teen: the new girl at Wickham Boarding School, she struggles to fit in enough to survive and stand out enough to catch the eye of the golden-boy lacrosse captain. But Lenah also just happens to be a recovering five-hundred-year-old vampire queen. After centuries of terrorizing Europe, Lenah is able to realize the dream all vampires have -- to be human again. After performing a dangerous ritual to restore her humanity, Lenah entered a century-long hibernation, leaving behind the wicked coven she ruled over and the eternal love who has helped grant her deep-seated wish.

Until, that is, Lenah draws her first natural breath in centuries at Wickham and rediscovers a human life that bears little resemblance to the one she had known. As if suddenly becoming a teenager weren’t stressful enough, each passing hour brings Lenah closer to the moment when her abandoned coven will open the crypt where she should be sleeping and find her gone. As her borrowed days slip by, Lenah resolves to live her newfound life as fully as she can. But, to do so, she must answer ominous questions: Can an ex-vampire survive in an alien time and place? What can Lenah do to protect her new friends from the bloodthirsty menace about to descend upon them? And how is she ever going to pass her biology midterm?

Yikes, it's been a while since I've posted. Maybe because I've been doing a lot of re-reading of comfort books... It's been a pretty lousy couple of weeks around here, so I'm going to just say that :)

On to the book: I'm torn between loving this book, and the fact that it made me want to tear my hair out on more than one occasion. Actually, I nearly had to get out my red pen and start making comments in the margins. It it hadn't been a library book, I probably would have. Seriously, this book was lacking in the editing department, and I NEVER say that. But there were so many instances of: the same word being used twice (or more) in the same paragraph/sentence/page where it was uber distracting; no sense of placement (such as her shaking hands with someone while sitting on top of a tall wall that should have made it impossible to shake with the dude on the ground--just one example, there were many); references to things that have already been noted that she didn't know what they were ("scratch the needle moment" when she'd already said she didn't know what recorded music was); and then explanations of things multiple times, often within the same page--or other things that needed to be explained earlier, but weren't. UGH. Not to sound all hoity-toity, but I've had early drafts of my own work that were a lot cleaner than this.

I don't know if it's because I spend a lot of time in my character's heads, and they're all older (around the same age as Lenah, actually) so I tend to pick up on the inconsistencies more, but it really, really got to me. BUT, the flashbacks were awesome. They were what kept me reading. I think if this book had been a historical--and honestly, there was no reason why it had to be set today--it would have sold me more. The writing there was tight and awesome, and I hated coming back to the modern scenes. Also, um, Justin? What it up with the main character and having like three lovers (or four, depending on how you count it) in one book? Why did that annoy me? And could someone please tell Lenah to get her emotions to stop bouncing around all over the place? In the course of five minutes she swings from elated to depressed and back again--it was giving me whiplash.

Okay, rant over. It was a good book. I may pick up the next two, but if things keep dragging me out of the story and making me sit there and try (unsuccessfully) to find a way to make them work, well, I just can't do it. (Dang, I sound bitchy in this post. I don't mean to. There were parts of this book I adored. I just can't help sitting here going "this book has some problems--like BIG problems--and it got picked up. Mine isn't. And Won't. And that makes me want to cry. And hide under my desk. And swear obscenities under my breath.)