Zoey wastes time in the bathroom doing nothing until she thinks the coast is clear, then heads out to her car.  Sunlight hurts her, but just in an annoying way.  Heaven forbid she have anything actually difficult to overcome, nope.  Don’t have to worry about how to get home, let’s just stick to worrying about if people see her or not.

Oh, look at that, she’s been spotted.  Heath shows up in a truck with some of his friends, and he’s drinking beer already.

Momentarily forgetting that I’d just been Marked and was destined to become an outcast blood-sucking monster, I scowled at Heath.

Zoey forgetting about being marked seems pretty much the same as Zoey remembering.  I mean, it’s not like it was that big a deal to her in the first place.  It was on par with ripping the butt seam in your pants.

Heath and Zoey talk about how they are so totally not dating because she doesn’t want to date him and also he’s a dick.  Uhg, I still don’t care about this line.  She’s never liked him and she doesn’t seem to be in any confusion about her feelings, so why the fuck is this even here?  Why introduce something that’s ending at the beginning of a book?

Finally, Heath notices her mark.

Heath’s eyes were still wide and shocked, but he lowered his voice. “Is that some kinda makeup thing you’re doing for drama class?”

“No,” I whispered. “It’s not.”

Boy just gave you a perfect out, and your only concern so far has been what other people think about you.  Why not just take the excuse and run with it?  Sure, he’ll learn the truth eventually, but by that point you’ll be at vampyre school, and also you hate the guy, so what do you care what he thinks while you’re several towns away and never going to see him again?  Lie long enough to get away, then forget about the guy and move on and stop fucking telling me about him because I don’t care.

She starts hacking/coughing, and one of Heath’s friends asks if she’s smoking.

“Dude! Leave her alone. You know she don’t smoke. She’s a vampyre.”

Uhhh, what?  What does being a vampyre have to do with smoking?  How are these thoughts connected?  Is this supposed to be a cause/effect statement, or is Heath just really bad at segues?

Zoey, instead of just getting the fuck out of there because it’s not like anyone is stopping her from leaving, decides to stick around so that they can call her a freak.  Then she tells them off for being insensitive.  She notices that the boys are scared of her, and that makes her feel powerful.

No.  That is not power.  Power is the ability to effect change in the world according to one’s own plans and desires.  Having shit happen around you or because of you, but without your consent, is not power.  Having people be scared of you for something you can’t help is not power.  Zoey didn’t want to scare people, but in spite of this desire, people became scared of her anyway.  That’s about the opposite of power. 

I’m really fucking sick of this idea that the ability to scare the pee out of someone is the same thing as power.  It’s not.  Do you know what scared people do?  They lash out.  They become unreasonable.  They do whatever they think they need to do in order to protect themselves, even if what they think they need is illogical.  Fear fucks with logic.  Scared people will attack the thing they are scared of.  Zoey should not be looking at these scared guys thinking she’s powerful.  She should be looking at them going “Oh, shit, they’re in a truck and I’m on foot.  If they get too nervous, they might think that running me over is a good idea.”  And unless being a vampyre makes one impervious to death-by-pickup, that’s not a good thing.

Now, people can also do what the guys in the book do (gun the truck and get out of dodge as fast as possible), but the person on the ground doesn’t know that’s what’ll happen.  The fact that Zoey assumes the correct outcome doesn’t mean she’s smart; it means she just got lucky.  Next time, when she runs across the ‘oh, shit, attack’ type, she’ll probably just stand around and let it happen because she confuses powerless with powerful.

Heath falls off the truck when the other guys gun it.  He suddenly smells like apple pie and rainbows (or whatever) because he’s bleeding.  He tries to tell Zoey that he still wants to date her, even though she’s expressed disgust at his assholery and he’s expressed shock and fear at her vampyrey. 

Zoey gets feels over how much she wants to eat him, but doesn’t quite realize that she’s about to nom on the guy.  The other two in the truck come back and snatch Heath before he can get eaten, though he’s none too happy about it. 

Zoey gets in her car and drives home.  When she gets there, she finally realizes she was lusting after Heath’s blood instead of Heath’s manhood, and the text does a sorta-okay job of displaying a confused teenager who doesn’t want to admit something to herself.  She tries to rationalize it away and make excuses and just flatly deny facts.  Why couldn’t she have done this last chapter?

It still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, though.  She accepts that she’s been Marked with perfect equanimity, but then gets in denial about…?

She also calls Heath’s friends retards, because fuck it, we’re not going to get any king sensitivity from this book.

Hopefully, the troll would be totally hypnotized by his new Delta Force: Black Hawk Down video game (um…ew).

…why is a video game ‘ew’?  And why would anyone write a book like this?

Okay, I realize that this is supposed to sound like a teenager.  But it’s also supposed to sound like a professional book.  If I want slurs and stupid parenthetical asides, I can get on any random blog on the internet.  There is a difference between making your protagonist sound like a teenager and making your narration sound like it was written by a teenager, edited by a teenager, and published by a teenager.  Her word-choice and her priorities and her world-view should be age-appropriate, but there’s no teenager anywhere who’s going to think “You know, I just can’t connect with this because it lacks the proper number of judgmental asides in the narration.”

Granted, the teens probably aren’t going to care about those, but they are teenagers.  Their sense of literary taste is still being formed.  They will accept bad writing, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay for us to give them bad writing.  We, as adults, have a responsibility to give them good stuff to consume so that they can grow into thoughtful and intelligent members of society.  That’s pretty much our job.  You don’t let small children eat nothing but candy and dirt, even though they would be happy to do so.  You don’t let teenagers read nothing but poor writing and hateful insults, even though they would be happy to do so.  It’s not good for them.  It’s why I’ll never accept the argument that something is allowed to be stupid if it’s for kids.  No.  If it’s for kids, it’s even more important for it to be intelligently done than for adult things, because at least adults can be expected to just put something down if it’s shit.  (They often don’t, sadly, but I can still expect them to.)

Zoey decides she wants to talk to her mom about all this and avoid the rest of her family.

As usual, I went in through the garage.

Why do I care?  It’s not like I’m going to think “Gasp, the garage!  How avant-garde!  I wonder why she did that!” and only understand if she tells me that it’s what she usually does.

She finds her mother reading, then tells us that her mom used to read romance novels and wear make-up, unlike now where she reads inspirational novels and doesn’t wear make-up.

Both were things her new husband didn’t allow (what a turd).

Your parentheses will never be clever.  Ever.

Now, yeah, asking your new wife to change herself to fit your morals is a bad idea.  Changing yourself to fit your new husband’s morals is a bad idea.  But I have two problems with this:

1. Religious conversions happen.  They happen all the time.  People become more or less conservative, mostly because as they grow their priorities and values tend to change.  Someone who liked romance novels as a young woman might find them distasteful as she gets into her 40s or 50s.  (Or, her views could go the opposite way.)  Someone who doesn’t care for religion when young could find themselves really needing faith and structure at a later point in their lives.  It happens.  Since we have no idea of anything to do with her mother, we don’t know if her change happened just because of her new step-dad.  Maybe her mom was starting to change already, starting to say “hey, I want to be more conservative,” and in the process of shopping for long dresses and finding a new church, she also found this guy who lined up with what she wanted her life to be like.

I mean, it could easily be that she upset her life for the sake of a man, but we don’t have any evidence of that.  I’m really fucking sick of books just assuming that I’m going to agree with them, and therefore they don’t need to justify jack-shit.

2.  Good god, why can’t we ever have a depiction of conservative Christians in media without them being horrific bad guys?  Yes, conservatism does have a reputation of shoving their values in everyone else’s face.  It’s okay to not like make-up, but not okay to think anyone who does wear make-up is a whore.  I’ll grant you that.  BUT EVERYONE FUCKING DOES THIS.  Conservatives do not corner the market and being judgmental.  They are not the only people who think that their values need to be shared by the rest of the world.  That’s something that is part of the human condition, not tied to religion.  It’s a bad thing, yes, but stop blaming it on the Christians!  Conservatives don’t even necessarily have to be WBC-esque.  I grew up in a conservative Christian household, and my parents taught me that the best way to spread the word of religion was to be a good example, then explain my beliefs when and if anyone comes to me and asks about them.  Be a light and let others come to you, but don’t judge them or chase them, because that won’t make them receptive to anything you have to say.  They weren’t perfect and I’m not either (as evidenced by the number of ‘fucks’ already in this post), but we’re not bad people.

I don’t mind if Zoey doesn’t share my views, because it’s pretty common to dislike step-parents and blow everything they do out of proportion, but the sheer pervasiveness of this character type has me twitching every time it comes up.  There’s just so little variety available, and it makes me sad.

Zoey’s mom sees the mark and demands to know what Zoey did now.  Zoey argues that it’s a thing that was done to her, that it’s not her fault.  I think this is supposed to be an allegory for something, but it only lasts for a couple of lines, then it gets dropped.  Besides, considering she felt ‘powerful’ a couple pages ago, it feels really insulting to also compare being marked to any sort of victimhood. 

Zoey asks her not to tell her stepdad.  She’s going to have to move to the new school, so she wants her mom to lie and say she’s at her friend’s house, then break the news once she’s good and away.

“So what you’re saying is that you want me to lie to him.”

“No, Mom.

Uh, you want her to say that you’re at Kyla’s house, even though you’re at the vampyre school.  If that’s not a lie, then what is?

What I’m saying is that I want you, for once, to put what I need before what he wants. I want you to be my mama. To help me pack and to drive with me to this new school because I’m scared and sick and I don’t know if I can do it all by myself!”

So, is she saying that if her stepdad found out, he’d keep her mom from doing all this?  Because I’m really not seeing why telling him would mean that her mom can’t help her pack.  Is he the type to just up and throw her out without so much as a toothbrush?  Because that’s something that really needs to be explained.  Otherwise, she’s not asking her mom to ‘place her needs before his wishes.’  She’s asking to ‘place her wishes above being honest with your husband.’

Then they argue about how her mom is a different person since getting married, and I really don’t care, because I don’t have a fucking clue what’s going on.  I don’t know what her mother was like before getting married (other than her reading choices), and I don’t have any information about how her mother has supposedly failed her since then.  We don’t even get a sense of how she’s handling the whole marked thing, because immediately after bringing up the matter, Zoey changed the conversation over to talking about lying to her stepfather.  All without any context or any clue about why telling him would be a bad thing.  For all I know, her mother would be perfectly right to tell, because nothing bad would happen, and Zoey is just being a melodramatic teenager. 

Zoey screams at her mom, saying that her older sister is a slut who screwed half the football team (yay, misogyny!) and her brother plays bloody video games all the time.  But her mom doesn’t realize this because she doesn’t pay attention, and her two other children are just pretending to be perfect.

First, how does Zoey know her sister is promiscuous?  Is she having sex in the house?  Or is Zoey just seeing her be flirtatious and making assumptions?  Is she playing Peeping Tom to her sister?  Really, where does this come from?  Now, I would agree that ‘screwing half the football team’ is a bad idea, but mostly because it just doesn’t seem very healthy.  High schoolers aren’t known for practicing safe sex, and also having sex at that age has far more ramifications than the people doing it seem to realize.  It’s really, really hard to know yourself well enough at 16 to judge whether you are in a state to have mentally and emotionally safe sex, as well as physically safe sex.  All that being said, though, I don’t think someone who has that much sex in high school is a bad person.  At most, they might have some issues to work through, but I’d hardly say that having issues makes someone a dirty, dirty slut.  However, far more likely than that, Zoey’s sister is just having some amount of sex, and Zoey is blowing it all out of proportion because she’s a terrible person who will say mean and hurtful things about everyone around her. 

Second, the thing with the video games is just out of left field.  Yeah, there’s some pretty graphic and unsettling things that get promoted by the video game culture, but again: playing them doesn’t automatically turn you into a bad person. 

Who in this family is supposed to be the ultra-tight-laced judgmental fuckwad again? 

They call that vampyre school the House of Night, but it can’t be any darker than this perfect home!“

Seriously, Zoey, WHAT ARE THEY DOING THAT’S SO BAD?  There has been not one word, not one word, so far about why her home life is so awful or what, specifically, she hates about it.  They probably make her eat veggies and do the dishes.  *unimpressed*

I hope they all drown.

Yeah, I’m starting to think that Zoey’s parents are perfectly normal, and she’s just a horrifically dreadful teenager.

They probably don’t even have normal classes. They probably have classes like Ripping Peoples Throats Out um and…and…Intro to How to See in the Dark Whatever.

Yes, a teenager might say that.  Narration is not the same as speech.  Narration exists in its own little category of not-quite-talking and not-quite-stream-of-consciousness.  It needs to be well-edited and distinctly lacking in ‘um’s.  This is utter crap, and also I hate the editor.

Zoey decides she’s going to run away, then she packs a bag while doing that “lol, vampyres all wear black, right?” thing.  She clearly has no idea what it means to be a vampyre, as all of her thoughts line up pretty well with the latest view of what vampires are: slightly-gothic, tortured pre-hipsters who don’t really do anything except look dark’n’shit.  There’s enough knowledge floating around about these people that everyone knows what school they go to and to have a debate about if they are alive or not, but apparently not enough for Zoey to actually know anything about them, so she has to just make guesses based on pop-culture.  Yet at the same time, Zoey has to get her own ass to the school, and there’s no one around to guide her or even ensure that she actually shows up.  The tracker marked her, then he got dropped, and now…now she’s just going along?  What, has there never been anyone scared enough to just hide and refuse to go to the special school?  Has there never been someone who got marked and then was so shocked they couldn’t figure out what they should do next?  Fuck, even Hogwarts sent a letter of introduction. 

Before she can get finished packing and leave, her stepfather comes home saying they need to talk.  She calls him ‘it’ and ‘the enemy,’ so I’m sure this will go over well.

Also, notice he knocked on her door and asked her talk, not kicked in the door and threw her out of his house.  Stupid fucking brat of a teenager.