Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Review: A Night Without Stars (The Lola Chronicles #1) by Jillian Eaton

Book Blurb:

You might know vampires...but you don't know Lola.

Sixteen-year-old Lola Sanchez is no hero. Snarky, rebellious, and completely fed up with her life, she has one goal: graduate high school and get the hell out of her small hometown. Until a night of terror and bloodshed changes everything...forever.

Now the only thing Lola wants to do is survive. But how can she survive when everything she knows has been destroyed and the one person she thought she could trust ends up being the most dangerous person of all?

My Review:

4 Out of 5 Stars

Genre: Scary, Supernatural, Survival, Teen, Vampires--

Lola feels reckless and decides that she will break into and hot-wire a car. But what she does not expect is that she would hear someone screaming and go to investigate, just to encounter a strange man with metal teeth. As her world slowly starts falling apart one strange encounter at a time, Lola realizes that something is very wrong. How is one reckless girl supposed to save herself, not to mention others, in a world that is suddenly dangerous and scary?

I can honestly say that I have never read a book quite like this before and I enjoyed the ride. This was a subtle type of scary, where is slowly built as the book progressed until it was right in your face and you could not help but be surprised. I liked the pacing of the book the best, with the reader dropped into the book with Lola, both unsuspecting as to what will happen. The vampires used here were unlike any vampire I have read about before, maybe closer to the vampires from the movie 40 Days of Nights (actually the whole book felt like a teen version of that movie but with snark and some humor), who just want to go out and destroy everything, with their own hierarchy where man is at the very bottom. The book was full of murder, mayhem, gore and a lot of quirky attitude and snark, just the way I like it.

Lola was an interesting character. She acts out, even though she knows why she acts act just as well as a therapist would, but it doesn’t stop her. As she puts it, “because she can”. At times I wanted to hug her (aka protect her) from accepting her lack of a future, and the weight of her life dragging her down. Despite the scary challenges, Lola staid very positive about her survival during the apocalypse (as she called it). I love the fact she thanked Hollywood for preparing her for how to deal with all the gore and violence, which is too true for films today. She made commentary that was morbid yet so very honest, at time it surprised a laugh out of me at the most inappropriate of times (“…at least he died of natural causes. Sort of.”). She was so strong and surprisingly capable (at least of handling the emotional practical issues), I rooted her on.

I don’t think I will ever think of calling 911 the same, which was probably the freakiest part of the book. The ending was awful and such a cliff hanger, and I did not know that this was the first in a series until after the story ended, which means that I need the next book asap.

I received this title from the author in return for my honest review.

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