Sunday, April 22, 2012

Julie Kagawa: The Immortal Rules

I seem to be stuck in the YA niche. :) Not that I mind.

And it's turning out to be a dystopian, futuristic YA worlds I'm reading about. In this one, the vampires live in cities and humans are registered and kept practically as cattle because they are registered in order to give their monthly supply of blood for vampires and that is all they do. They survive for only that reason.
Then you have the Unregistereds who do not want to give blood but at the same time, cannot gain the food. So they are forced to scrounge and find whatever they can while remaining hidden from vampire powers.

And then we have Allie, who hates the vampires with a vengeance and of course, runs into trouble that causes her to become one.
As usual I won't go into the details of the story, there is so much I could write about it. The world is well detailed and well described so you can imagine it without any problems.
The reasons how the future world came to be dominated by vampires and how people ended up as nothing more than vessels of vampire food is described as well.

As you could expect, there must exist a place in this world where people live where they aren't food, but it would be too much to describe how we get to know about that part. :)

The stuff I found both interesting and frigthening is how after an apocalyptic event in the world's possible future, it wouldn't take long for the people to lose much of the knowledge they now have. If you remove the books and no knowledge gets transfered to children, after 2 or 3 generations, no one is  able to read any longer.

What bothered me a bit about the book is the fact that everything always falls exactly right for Allie, even when it seems it's going wrong, in the end it turns out right. Not to mention the fact that at some points, I was rolling my eyes at how blind/stupid people can be, but then again, it could be just my low tolerance of stupidity (which I know I have).

But, the world building is great, you really feel pulled into it and there are zombies! Kind of. :)

Even with these little things I thought could have been done better, I didn't feel like stopping with the reading and finding something better (which is a clear sign for me the book is not really good) and I'm already looking forward to the next book in the series, so on the whole, I think it's a good addition to the YA pool of novels.



My copy of the book was provided through http://www.netgalley.com/

2 comments:

  1. I haven't read anything by Julie Kagawa so far, must be the only one in the blogosphere :D Despite everyone telling how awesome her books are, for some reason I always push them down my tbr list...but vampires will find a way to my shelf sooner or later :D

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    1. Ivana, this is the only one for me so far (but I noticed there are some other books by J. Kagawa).
      If you're choosing one, put this one closer to the top of your tbr pile. :)
      It's really interesting.

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