#redeemed

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At last, Zoey Redbird has what she wanted: Neferet's evil has been exposed, and the High Council is no longer on her side. However, she's far from done wreaking havoc in the vampyre world. With the seeds of distrust sown and Darkness breeding chaos at the House of Night, everyone must band together, but that's proving to be more difficult than ever before.

On top of that, Zoey saw something when she looked at Neferet's minion, Aurox, through the Seer Stone that she can hardly explain to herself, let alone her friends. Zoey knows that following her instincts might be just what they need to defeat evil... but if she's wrong, it could cause the destruction of those closest to her.

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Drastically altered after her fall, Neferet is now more dangerous than ever, and her quest for vengeance will wreak havoc on humans, as well as Zoey Redbird and her friends. A brutal murder at an open house leads to chaos being loosed in Tulsa, and the House of Night is blamed. Aphrodite is disowned by her family, and all fledglings and vampyres are confined to the school.

Tensions are rising at the House of Night, and the balance cannot be maintained for long. Can Zoey handle her powers amidst death and betrayal? Can she stop Neferet in time to keep her anger from escalating to full-on war? Or will someone else have to step in to take the fall?

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Zoey Redbird is in trouble. Having surrendered herself to the police, she has isolated herself from her friends and mentors, determined to face the punishment she deserves – even if that means her body will reject the Change and begin to die. Only the love of those closest to her can save her from the Darkness in her spirit, but a terrible evil has emerged from the shadows, more powerful than ever.

Meanwhile, Neferet has finally made herself known to mortals and crowned herself a Dark Goddess. The vampyres know that nobody is strong enough to vanquish her – unless they have the power both to summon the elements and to wield Old Magick. Only Zoey is heir to such power, and a final epic battle of Light versus Darkness will decide who is redeemed…and who is forever lost.

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I originally started rereading these books because I remember absolutely loving them as a teen – hell, this is one of the only book series that I’ve ever bought merch for! – and while I can kind of see what the appeal was, the best I can say for them now is that there are a couple of decent ideas in here (such as vampires having essentially a second puberty instead of instantly becoming creatures of the night), and it’s a damn shame that they weren’t the focus.

Instead, most of the pages are taken up with truly shocking amounts of cultural appropriation (which I went into a little rant about here), secondary characters that are literally just stereotypes (e.g. the few queer characters all unironically say things like ‘teeheehee’, and all of the ‘girls and gays’ love fashion), and ‘jokes’ about things that shouldn’t be joked about or dismissed in that way; this includes child murder, pseudo-bestiality, sexual assault victims being slut-shamed by the so-called ‘heroes’, and the full-throated use of the r-word, also by the ‘heroes’.

On top of that, it became a generic and predictable ‘dark fantasy’ story reasonably early on and never quite got away from it – every Native American character is capable of tapping into ‘the power of their ancestors’, the female villain is psychic and manipulative and relies heavily on her sexuality, and several of the male characters are forgiven for rapes and murders because they apologised a single time (usually to someone who wasn’t their victim, or at least not their only victim).

I could say a lot more about what’s wrong with this series, and with these three books in particular, but I’ve given more than enough of my time to these authors already. I’m going to get through the spin-off books as quickly as I can – there’s four short stories and then a copy of the in-universe textbook, so it won’t take long – and then the whole series is going straight to charity! If anyone wants to recommend some better books to take their place on my bookshelf, feel free.