Book Review: The Immortal Rules by Julie Kagawa

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Mira Books (4 May 2012)
• Language English
• ISBN-10: 184845094X
• ISBN-13: 978-1848450943

In a future world, Vampires reign. Humans are blood cattle. And one girl will search for the key to save humanity.

Allison Sekemoto survives in the Fringe, the outermost circle of a vampire city. By day, she and her crew scavenge for food. By night, any one of them could be eaten.

Some days, all that drives Allie is her hatred of them. The vampires who keep humans as blood cattle. Until the night Allie herself is attacked—and given the ultimate choice. Die… or become one of the monsters.

Faced with her own mortality, Allie becomes what she despises most. To survive, she must learn the rules of being immortal, including the most important: go long enough without human blood, and you will go mad.

Then Allie is forced to flee into the unknown, outside her city walls. There she joins a ragged band of humans who are seeking a legend—a possible cure to the disease that killed off most of humankind and created the rabids, the mindless creatures who threaten humans and vampires alike.

But it isn't easy to pass for human. Especially not around Zeke, who might see past the monster inside her. And Allie soon must decide what—and who—is worth dying for.

Allie and her gang live in hiding, scurrying for food and fleeing from the thing that terrifies them most. Vampires.

They live in a vampire city where humans are treated like blood cattle and forced to pay taxes, but not with money. But there are those that cheat the system and live off the grid. Allie and her friends are a few of those people. But when they are attacked one night and Allie hovers between life and death, she is offered a choice to live or die.

She chose life. As a vampire.

But instead of becoming a blood thirsty fiend, Allie managed to hold onto the scrap of humanity inside her, and while she needed a liquid diet to survive, she didn’t need to kill to do it.  When Allie is forced to leave the city she knows, she turns to the open road, walking and ambling with no sense of direction. Until she meets Zeke and his group of people searching for a better life. Allie has to hide who she really is, especially from the boy who looks closer than anyone.

The Immortal Rules is following the recent trend of vampire novels where they aren’t brooding and love-struck sparkly heroes. These aren’t the romanticised vampires but the ruthless and deadly ones. And it’s amazingly refreshing.

I really liked the idea of The Immortal Rules and Allie’s struggle to keep her animal instincts at bay. Her vampire creator, Kanin, was one of my favourite characters. He intrigued me and was such a complex novel that I actually wished it was more about him than Allie.

But while there were a lot of plus points to this novel, in my opinion, there were too many negative ones. What jarred me the most were all the different sections to the novel. Character progression and story arcs are pivotal to a good book, but too much, like in this case, killed it stone dead for me. Too much was going on and I felt it could have been a much shorter book.

As a huge fan of the Iron Fey series, this book had a lot to live up to. Unfortunately it just didn’t stand up as well as the authors other books. That said, I am still a huge fan of her work and will still continue to read her future books. This instalment of her new series will please endless vampire buffs and is a welcome addition to what is an over-written genre, but takes it into a fresh and edgy new world.