I wasn't planning on reading Evernight this month. I just picked it up really impulsively from the library because I read the author's other book, Fateful, and really enjoyed it last year. I thought I would probably like it, and it has quite a few decent reviews. I probably should have passed on it, simply because there are way too many series I need to finish and this just adds to the pile. Still, I ended up enjoying it for the most part. I'm pretty indifferent towards these covers though - on one hand, I kind of like the font, but they also look a little strange and kind of boring. 
 I'll start with my complaints - if I didn't know that this was a vampire novel going into it, I wouldn't have realized that's what it was until about halfway through. I definitely would have suspected something paranormal would happen (because the students at the school were just too graceful and strange to be human), but at first everything is just normal. There's a new student trying to fit in at a boarding school with snobbish students. The vampire twist is not revealed for a long time. I found it very hard to believe that Bianca would not have said anything internally about the subject. I realize it's so the reader doesn't know what's going on, but come on. If you have vampire parents who have told you all your life that someday you will be a vampire too, it's not something that crosses your mind once a month. Bianca herself is not an extremely likeable protagonist. She's whiny sometimes and despite her insistence that she's terrible with meeting people, she doesn't seem to have much trouble talking with others. 
 Evernight also has a terrible case of insta-love. I rolled my eyes quite frequently at the romance between Lucas and Bianca. They speak once the night before school starts and the next day Bianca basically assumes that they're best friends. She never stops thinking about him - ever. There's a scene when they're on a date in a diner and Lucas gets in a fight with one of the other customers. The two of them "break up" for a brief amount of time and Bianca's friend Raquel tells her that it's good they're not together anymore because Lucas might have a bad temper and be violent. Bianca dismisses this idea rather quickly, and I couldn't help but wish she had considered it more seriously. 
 Personally, that would have been a major red flag for me. And the things they say to each other border on being cheesy. Since the romance was the main part of the book, I feel like I didn't enjoy it as much as I could have because I didn't ship the main pair that much. Balthazar was a much better guy, in my opinion. He was kind and smart and already a vampire. Honestly I didn't understand Bianca's attraction to Lucas when she had a guy like Balthazar right there. 
 Despite all of that, I really enjoy Gray's writing style. She describes the creepiness of the school really well and the side characters were interesting despite their minor roles in the story. I particularly liked Bianca's parents - I always like it when a protagonist in a YA book has a good relationship with their mom or dad (in this case, both). I was also pulled into the story almost immediately, and though Gray doesn't really make many changes to the traditional vampire, I still thought it was cool that many of them had to learn about technology because they were born in a time period when it wasn't used nearly as much. The twist that was thrown in at the end about the Black Cross hunters was unexpected, and honestly I thought it was the best part of the book. I'll probably end up finishing this series at some point, even though it wasn't quite as great as I wanted it to be. 
 3 stars