Bagged & Boarded: House of Night

houseofnight [If you’ve been following me on Twitter lately, you know that I’ve really gotten into comics in the last six or so months for personal reading as well as I’ve also been collecting graphic novels for work. Starting today, and every Wednesday, I’ll be reviewing comics and graphic novels that I’ve recently read. Some will be new stuff, some will be old, others will be about the theory and practice of sequential art, with the goal to not only learn more myself but to help other comic virgins navigate this world.]
House of Night (5 book miniseries) | 3.5/5
Quick Summary: Miniseries that takes place behind and between the scenes of Betrayed, the second novel in the HoN series by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast.
I picked up House of Night for two reasons: Issue #1 was staring at me in my face AND I liked the cover art. Since House of Night was released in November, I was able to find all five issues fairly quickly and read the series in quick succession. The story was pretty simple: main protagonist, Zoey Redbird, has become the unwilling leader of the Dark Daughters, an elite society at her vampire boarding school. Each issue covers Zoey’s journey to leadership while she masters the five elements bestowed on her while figuring out the lesson behind each element. As each element has its own goddess attached to it, much of the comic is spent on that back history of the goddess and the lesson Zoey is to learn. Think of this as Hex mashed with Twilight.
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Reviews: Books: Break, break of dawn

I’m taking advantage of the “post in the future” feature on WordPress. When this posts at 12:01 A.M. on August 2, I’ll be at $corporate_bookstore flinging copies of the fourth and (hopefully) final book of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series into the (overly) eager hands of her “fans.” And I use that term loosely.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, Meyer’s series is being touted to become “the next Harry Potter.” Where as in HP you had this fantastical world that was built upon mythology, legend, and folklore that essentially breaks down to good versus evil, in Twilight, it is a convoluted twist on the trusty Romeo and Juliet story, and like HP, is made contemporary. Other than the plot and storylines being radically different, there are also two very important slight differences between HP and Twilight: Twilight has enough sexual tensions, longing, desire and drama to cater to every 15 year old teenage girl’s inner sanctum in their heart of hearts (HP has the teenage angst of first love in the later books but it’s damned near chaste and virginal compared to the apparent “searing” heat in Twilight) and secondly, Twilight is so poorly written that it makes HP look like high brow literature.
But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
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