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Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Hourglass review

Hourglass
by Claudia Gray
HarperCollins
March 2010

Young lovers Bianca Olivier and Lucas Ross have run away from Evernight Academy and are living on the run as part of a Black Cross cell in New York. Readers who haven't read the first installments in the series are strongly advised to go back and read Evernight and Stargazer first. This story picks up right where Stargazer left off. Even though Bianca and Lucas are teenagers, their relationship takes on the quality of college students living together. Lucas' mother Kate, never maternal at best, really doesn't appear to bat an eyelash at their relationship, she's simply suspicious of any outsiders. During their getaway from Evernight, Bianca's human roommate Raquel, now aware that most of the students at the school are vampires, chooses to run with them. As Bianca struggles to hide her nascent vampirism, Raquel starts to develop feelings for Dana, one of the Black Cross hunters. There's kind of a dystopian feel to this book, as Bianca and Lucas are on the run, and living in rat-trap motels or abandoned subway stations. Lucas allows Bianca to drink some of his blood, but she is forced to supplement her diet by drinking the blood of pigeons, and the suspicious number of pigeon corpses in proximity to their headquarters tips off Black Cross members that something is amiss.

Thinking that she's been kidnapped by Black Cross, the crew at Evernight makes plans to try to rescue Bianca, Balthazar ends up being captured by the group, creating more problems for Lucas and Bianca whose loyalties are definitely split. And of course, Balthazar's crazy sister Charity is floating around as well, providing a constant sense of menace and threat.

I was stunned by the end of this book. Gray has taken the story in another direction that I definitely did not expect. I was certainly nursing my own theories about Bianca's heritage -- maybe she was a purely human infant stolen by vampire parents who wanted to play house? Maybe she could avoid being turned vampire? Or perhaps her vampiric conversion is inevitable? At the last possible moment, Gray surprises readers once again, with another twist of the plot.


I borrowed this book from the library.

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