Hello Readers, welcome back to my blog. I hope we are all keeping safe and watching the madness of this pandemic, I pray for us all and that no matter which part of the world we are in we can come through this season stronger.

“Zoey Montgomery! Night has chosen thee; thy death will be thy birth. Night calls to thee; hearken to Her sweet voice. Your destiny awaits you at the House of Night!”

Marked is the first book in the House of Night series. The story is about a sixteen year old Zoey who gets marked as a vampire and has to leave her family and friends to join the House of Night school.

The story begins with how Zoey is marked and the reaction of her friends and family is not very encouraging especially at a time when Zoey is frightened and needs a lot of support. Zoey’s mark is unlike any other, she is special and blessed by the goddess Nyx. She has a wonderful grandmother but her ex-boyfriend and ex-best friend are annoying which she is happy to leave behind. Zoey gets to know her new roommates and friends; there is a budding romance brewing and an enemy that needs to be taken down. It ends on a cliff hanger that makes me impatient to pick up the next book in the series.

I remember reading this book when I was seventeen and it feels a little weird now to be reading about a sixteen year old especially when I am at the latter years of my 20s, it reminds me of all the angst of teenage years and am so glad to be out of it. One of the reasons why I fell in love with this book was the diversity of the characters’ race and sexual orientation which was a novelty for me at the time when I first read it (it was hard for me to find a book about people of colour and different sexual orientation at that time). I loved Shaunee and felt related to her the most at a time when I didn’t see a lot of black characters in stories paranormal fantasy romance books but I felt as though her uniqueness was swallowed up by twinning with Erin (her individuality was drowned). And while I loved that both Erin and Shaunee were representing what the whole world could be which is to love each other despite the colour of our skin, I felt like they lost their individuality in this story to achieve that. I hope that this gets improved in the other books of the series.