I think that I read too many Sweet Valley Highs as a teen because lately, series turn me off. I can’t describe my negative reaction to a series without a finite end enough to identify what it is that bugs me, except to say that it’s similar to my dislike of soap operas. A soap opera allows a character to experience happiness for at least a few minutes of an episode before turning the sparkly pink happiness into great weeping (but never mascara-running) tears of woe. A series, particularly one that fringes or lands squarely in the Land o’Romance, has to keep some plotlines open to continue interest, and can’t wrap everything up. Even the happily ever after isn’t entirely happy, because there’s More To Come. There’s this neverending feeling of “Tune in Next Week!” to find out if there’s ever going to be a resolution – and really, I’m just too much of a mental slacker to manage it all.

Part of the problem is that I have a really, breathtakingly, no I’m not kidding it’s BAD, memory. Add to that pregnancy hormones and I barely remember my own damn name. So if you have a series where each installment comes out every six or seven months – or fuck it, every three to four YEARS like some potters I might mention – there’s no way I can recall every detail and remember what it was that was happening When We Last Saw Lord Clusterhump and Lady Danderhead….

So for me to find a series that I willingly and eagerly keep up with, or at least look for the next issue with anticipation, that is a rare thing indeed, and there have been a few that I try to remember to look for.

All of this ramble preamble does have a purpose: The House Of Night series? Very very good. Worth keeping, and keeping up with.

Zoey Redbird, a completely normal teenager subject to life with a spineless mother and a supremely right-wing religious nutjob stepfather, finds herself marked as a vampire in the middle of the hallway one afternoon at school. Aside from the total abject humiliation of having an outline of a blue crescent moon appear on her forehead after some tall-dark-and-weird dude announces she is one of the marked, Zoey also has to deal with faster-than-instant-pudding ostracization from her peers, her ex-boyfriend, and her best friend, not to mention the hell-and-damnation rhetoric of her stepfather.

More pressing, however, was the fact that if Zoey didn’t get her marked self over to the House of Night, a boarding school/incubator for fledgling vampires, she was going to die. Not even living at the school guarantees her survival, but not going at all pretty much assures her of a very brief post-Marked life. So she sneaks out after being locked in her room by Asshat Stepdad, parrot of the religious right, and runs to her grandmother for help.

Her grandmother, a Cherokee Indian labeled a witch by Asshat Stepdad, isn’t home, and Zoey goes looking for her, only to feel herself getting sicker and sicker as her body begins the initial change far from the safety of the House of Night. She runs looking for her grandmother, but instead trips, knocks her head on a rock, and finds herself on an out-of-body journey to a meeting with Nyx, the Goddess of Night and the Goddess of the Vampyres. Nyx marks her again as her own, this time by filling in what had been an outline of a moon on Zoey’s forehead – something that shouldn’t happen until much much later in the changing process – and tells her that she is special, the eyes and ears of the Goddess in the world. Zoey refutes this idea. Loudly. But since much of what has happened to her is out of her control, she accepts this idea of being a Goddess’ chosen daughter, and when she wakes up, Zoey finds herself safely at the House of Night, her grandmother beside her. Once recovered from her fall, however, she faces life in a new boarding school on her own, with the requisite challenges of avoiding the psychotic bitch queen bully girl, and making new friends who are at least as interesting as she is, while knowing that she doesn’t quite fit in at this school, either.

I’ve said before that I’m a big YA fan, and love a lot of YA books, and this is no exception.

Do I like Zoey? Yeah. She’s subject to a lot of forces that she can’t control or even remotely understand, but she operates on instincts that come from a good heart and an intelligent and strong moral code. She gets feelings that tell her clearly when to conceal things she knows, and while she doesn’t know why she’s being told by unseen forces to keep her mouth shut, she does it, and figures she’ll get the answer eventually. She’s been dropped into a world that’s much more powerful and scary than the world she’s used to, and she doesn’t whine about it. Zoey possesses enough self-confidence to navigate her new environment, but not so much self-confidence that she begins to irritate. The only thing that’s odd about Zoey is her very firm and outspoken stance that drugs of any kind are stupid, and those that do them are beyond morons. I was more expecting her to have a live-and-let-live kind of attitude, since most of the time she herself would like to be left alone, but her perspective is a theme throughout the story, and while it matches with her strength and her moral compass, it comes across almost abrasive – and I can see why other characters would find it a drag to listen to.

In the larger picture, though, this is a story of a teenager who is different for magical reason, but then becomes even more different than her already-different peer group. Add to that a boarding school, a whole lot of magical training, and there’s a very Obvious Comparison to be made. But fortunately, both writers Cast are aware of the similarities and do it all much better in this book.

Marked is different because the book is told in the first person and Zoey’s narration possesses a very unique voice. As I said, she isn’t much of a whiner, unlike some male marked-on-the-forehead characters I know, and she’s strong. The friends that she makes at school are believable in themselves, and aren’t just reflections or foils for Zoey. They’ve got their own problems and their own charms.

Further, one of the most unique aspects to the story is the world that Cast & Cast construct. Everyone knows there are vampires, but not much is said by Zoey or her friends (vamp or human) that indicates how or how much the vampires interact with humans. The humans know they could be marked as teenagers, and they know about the process and the existence of the school, but there isn’t much detail about how these two words interact, if at all.

Most obvious among the mentions of these parallel societies is the idea that prominent celebrities (to wit, Kenny Chesney and Faith Hill – Zoey’s roommate Stevie Rae is a country fan) are vampires. Interesting concept – and one answer as to why some people seem so incredibly talented AND good looking, if the excuse of digital vocal tuning and rampant airbrushing weren’t satisfactory.

In addition to that world are some nefarious elements that aren’t quite identifiable yet. The evil in the book, and the forces working against Zoey, and possibly against Nyx, are layered, mysterious, and of course not at all satisfactorily worked out in this, the first book of a series (dammit).

And yet again, I find myself butting heads with my frustration with series books. There are big threads left hanging that don’t allow the book to stand full on its own. It’s clearly a Book One, not just a book in and of itself. I do know from many a source that publishers who want a series want the books in the series to be clearly and obviously part of a larger whole, even if that means the individual books issued in the story need crutches to hold up a piece of the storyline. At this point I do expect to encounter a character saying, “And visit the bookstore next month when….” Seriously, publishing folks? It gets old. It’s stringing the reader along and this reader don’t like it much.

In this particular series, the larger questions that are left so very unanswered are very large indeed, and seem to encompass several entwined mysteries, leaving Zoey and the reader to question who is trustworthy, and what is happening to some of the students who don’t survive the complete change into full vampiredom? Yet even within those questions, the revelations of Zoey’s character, the development of her friends, and the potential for the future of the story arc in this series definitely cause me to look deliberately towards book 2 with an eye to read and enjoy.