Anyone else underwhelmed by this series?

[Alex]

I thought the first book was quite good, and was excited by a story where the main heroine becomes the monster she is hiding from... but it just didn't live up to my expectations.

Allie was super annoying. I found myself skimming through most of the second book and some of the third, just to bypass the over-done inner monologues and anything to do with her "inner monster".

Just... yeah. Underwhelmed.

What did anyone else think?

[Kela Esther]

I was also way into the first book and thought this series would be fantastic. It turned out to be just okay. Book 2, I lost some interest in the Zeke-Allie drama (thankfully there was no love triangle involved or I would have just given up on the entire series), but towards the end, everything picked up and I was into the series hardcore again.

Book 3, I wasn't into Zeke becoming a vampire. I really hated that. It went against everything Julie Kagawa set him up to be like and his drama with Allie was childish at best. The Sarren thing was just overdone. The vampire master giving up his life I was like "what?" And that irritated me. By the end of the book I just gave up, but out of respect for the author, I wouldn't rate it below a 3.

The series started off fantastic, but if it were to become a movie, some serious changes would have to happen to make me even consider going to see it.

[Alex]

I didn't mind Zeke becoming a vampire but I think Sarren should have corrupted him to the point where Zeke could not snap out of it, and Allie should have killed him.

Brutal, I know, but way more interesting than the self-loathing and "I'm a monster!" and Allie pining over him.

[Kela Esther]

Oooo that sounds like an intriguing concept she could have explored. It would have been certainly more interesting than the drama that unfolded. And it would have really brought home to us how evil Sarren was and still keep Zeke from being the creature he despised.

I wish authors would realize it's okay to kill the love interest or even the main character if it tells a better story or drives the story forward better.

[Aeryn]

Yeah... I loved the first book, watching Allie trying to cope with suddenly being on the other end of the predator-prey dynamic. It was absolutely fascinating to me. Her character was strong and interesting and I loved her to bits, and... then something happened. In the second and third book, she was little more than a typical angsty, impulsive teenage girl making one ridiculous move after another.

(I felt really bad for Kanin. He tried to make her see reason, over and over again, and still she went off and did things her own way. The girl just doesn't listen or learn unless it's convenient for the plot... I get that she's supposed to be rebelliously cool and independent, but by constantly disregarding the advice of a wise old vampire mentor she only succeeds in making herself look stupid.)

I never liked Zeke (nice, but boring), and the way he just kept popping up in Allie's life felt just a little too convenient to me. By the end of the second book I was thoroughly done with this character, and I sincerely hoped that he would be killed off at last (or at least, if he survived into the third book, that he'd been irreversibly corrupted). No such luck, of course.

I loved Kanin and Jackal, though. They were both wonderful characters, although with Kanin I sometimes felt like his dialogue was... not quite right, too generic and info-dumpy. This series has a bit of an issue with overexplaining and repetitiveness, both in dialogue and otherwise, and I felt that especially sharply with Kanin. It may be just my personal vision of the character, but from everything we've seen I feel that someone like him would strive to be as clear and concise as possible. If something can be said in 5 words instead of 50, he'd say it in 5 words.

Similarly, the characters' speech and mannerisms were often too similar to one another. Everybody shrugs, shakes their head, curls their lip in disgust, blinks, and so on. I understand that some of these things are common and can be difficult to avoid becoming repetitive, but in real life, even the most common, basic reactions vary from person to person. One person might shrug in every possible situation while another never does.

Overall, I feel like if this series wasn't YA, if Allie had been older and more mature, it might have been amazing until the very end. I don't think it even needs any sort of love story (or at least not one with a fairytale ending), I'd have been happy to just watch her trying to survive in that universe as a new vampire, discovering the vampire society and dealing with the harsh realities of everyday life. Heck, she could have just stuck around at New Covington, lived on the streets, changed it from the inside... but of course, then it would have been a different story entirely. :)

[Allie]

I agree with Alex. Either Zeke shouldn't have been able to be corrupted in the first place because he was so strong willed that it wasn't possible for Sarren (I really felt like that bit was just thrown in there so that the Kagawa had an excuse to make the story go that way) or he just should have been killed. Period.

I also agree that there were too many coincidences. It felt like there were a lot of instances of "oh - by they way - vampires can do this thing so now there's a problem" and I really didn't like that. I really strongly feel that Sarren being able to corrupt Zeke because there was this strange vampire power that we didn't know about until Kagawa needed it to make the story turn that way - was a cop out.

Overall it was a good series, but I really think Zeke should have died.

I also have to say - Jackal was my favorite character. The whole time.