Release Date: August 3rd, 2010
Genre: Romance/Supernatural/Paranormal
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Pages: 310
Series: Vampire Queen #1
Rating:
Goodreads Page: Click here
Summary: 

Lenah Beaudonte is, in many ways, your average teen: the new girl at Wickham Boarding School, she struggles to fit in enough to survive and stand out enough to catch the eye of the golden-boy lacrosse captain. But Lenah also just happens to be a recovering five-hundred-year-old vampire queen. After centuries of terrorizing Europe, Lenah is able to realize the dream all vampires have -- to be human again. After performing a dangerous ritual to restore her humanity, Lenah entered a century-long hibernation, leaving behind the wicked coven she ruled over and the eternal love who has helped grant her deep-seated wish.

Until, that is, Lenah draws her first natural breath in centuries at Wickham and rediscovers a human life that bears little resemblance to the one she had known. As if suddenly becoming a teenager weren’t stressful enough, each passing hour brings Lenah closer to the moment when her abandoned coven will open the crypt where she should be sleeping and find her gone. As her borrowed days slip by, Lenah resolves to live her newfound life as fully as she can. But, to do so, she must answer ominous questions: Can an ex-vampire survive in an alien time and place? What can Lenah do to protect her new friends from the bloodthirsty menace about to descend upon them? And how is she ever going to pass her biology midterm?

Review: This book received a 2.5 flower rating because I absolutely LOVED parts of it, and absolutely DIDN’T love parts of it. I will break my review into these two groups:

Things I Loved

The vampirism! It wasn’t something to be desired at all. In many vampire books, the vampires bemoan the fact that they are soulless monsters, surviving only through murder of innocents, and yet it’s glorified. In Infinite Days Maizel was very good at describing how being a vampire affects your emotional state. Vampires are very tortured creatures. I also love how she described that they couldn’t feel anything. The dead nerve endings? Very cool.

The ritual. Being turned from a vampire into a human?! What?! I’ve never heard of such a thing. The opposite, yes, but not this. How original.

The coven. I loved the history behind Lenah’s coven. Where they came from, why she chose them, etc.

Things I DIDN’T love

The romance. Honestly, as I watched Lenah slowly fall in love with the character she eventually ends up with I kept thinking “He’s gonna turn out to be evil. He’s go to.” Why was I thinking that? Because I HATED him. I honestly thought it was a joke. He wasn’t appealing to me at all. Blah. And the guy she left behind? I actually did like him. Made me very irked. Oh. And there's a sex scene. SUPER vague. But still, teenage sex. Blah.

The pacing. I kept expecting exciting things to happen. Certainly NOW she’ll have to fight for her life. No? Just dissect a frog? Oh… well, maybe in the next chapter… nope. She’s just going snorkeling. This was another one of those books that tricked me into believeing it was a paranormal story, when really it was just a romance story with a paranormal sub genre (for more information on how I feel about this, see rant).

The magic. I initially thought the magic was really cool, and then I noticed some inconsistencies that really bothered me.

The ending. BLAH! I really disliked the ending. It seemed rushed, confused, and illogical. And what REALLY irked me was that it was a cliffhanger ending, but the first chapter of the second book was included and it RUINED THE CLIFFHANGER! I shouldn’t have read it. If you’re going to end with a cliffhanger (I should mention that I loved the last line) don’t give it away on the next page! Especially since the next book doesn’t come out until 2011!

Anyway. There you go. My rather long review of Infinite Days