I don’t remember how I came across Claudia Gray’s Evernight, but I knew it was about vampires, so it was enough for me to give it a try. I liked it, and I want to write a review about it, but I am at a serious impasse. I am not against throwing spoiler alerts left and right, but in this case I feel somehow…hesitant. Anyway, here it goes: SPOILER ALERT around the corner.

Bianca Olivier has been enrolled at Evernight, a boarding school for the rich and the spoiled. She doesn’t have much of a choice in terms of liking it or not, since her parents teach at the school and are adamant about her studying there. Things get better when Bianca meets Lucas Ross who has decided to protect her from the evilness lurking in the shadows of the school.

The love story follows the usual patterns of teen angst with a light side of supernatural elements, when at page 139 Bianca shows her true colors. She is the vampire. Not only that, she is a born vampire. Everybody who is a serious vampire fan knows that vampires are made, not born. Which in turns should elicit the old time question about who made the first vampire…something like the egg and the chicken conundrum. But I digress.

I liked how Claudia Gray played with words from the beginning of the story letting the readers know that Bianca is special, and that her parents consider her as their little miracle come through. I thought that it was rather clever to describe Bianca’s world from her point of view, without letting out her nature. The author treated her character being a vampire the same way as ethnicity, or skin color. It stands to reason to think that if the protagonist is from India, for example, he or she will refer to food as simply food, not Indian food. Therefore Bianca doesn’t say exactly what she eats, food is food for her, even when her meal is a warm cup of blood.

Bianca bites Lucas, not once but twice. The second time with his permission. The second bite leaves Lucas with heightened senses, and Bianca seeks adults’ advice on what is happening to him. And that is when it turns out that Lucas is not who he seems, as well. He is part of Black Cross, a league of vampire hunters. Once discovered, Lucas runs away and Bianca follows him, only to be separated again when her parents and several vampires come to rescue her from the Black Cross’ crutches.

In a nutshell, Bianca and Lucas’ love story is the young adult vampire version of Romeo and Juliet, minus the ending, otherwise there wouldn’t be other three books after the first one. And let’s face it, nobody really likes it when young characters die in the name of love.