Review for Infinite Days by Rebecca Maizel

When I first heard about this book months ago I immediately added it to my wish list and started counting down the days until its release date. It sounded right up my street- a fresh new take on vampires with it being about a 500 year old vampire queen being re-made as a 16 year old human girl, and after reading this the books biggest triumph is definitely the originality of it all but unfortunately for me that’s pretty much where it ends. Lenah Beaudonte is a ruthless, murderess vampire queen to a coven of some of the most feared vampires in the world. Having been made into a vampire in 15th century England she is one of the oldest and strongest of her kind. Despite all of this Lenah isn’t happy. After being turned into a vampire by her lover Rhode at the young age of sixteen Lenah feels like she’d missed out on her chance to live life, so as Rhodes last act of love he performs an ancient ritual that allows her to reclaim the human life that he took away from her. Lenah must now live as a mortal in a boarding school in New England and try to stumble her way through modern technology, make friends and keep her past a secret. But when you’ve lived your days as an evil creature of the night it’s not so easy to put your past and your mistakes behind you, and when Lenah’s coven discovers that their queen is missing Lenah realises that her human days may be numbered… I loved the idea of this story and when I first started it I found myself really enjoying it. It was interesting learning about Lenah’s past as a vampire queen and watching her try to fit in and appear normal amongst her peers but my problem started when this didn’t stop. For 300 pages there’s no real action and it reads very much like a YA realism book. Yes it’s all very interesting watching a vampire try to live as a human but after the first 100 pages it got very tedious and boring and by the time I was half way through I was debating putting it down. When I pick up a book about vampires I expect it to be action packed, and filled with blood and lust but Infinite days just didn’t read that way. The plot moved along very slowly making some parts boring to read. It wasn’t what I was expecting when I picked this book up so it left me very disappointed. The second problem I had with this book were the characters. Be warned - if you find Zoey Redbirds boy problems irritating in The House of Night series you may not get along so well with Lenah Beaudonte. Like Zoey, Lenah has a string of 4 boys in this book that she has some sort of thing with who are all fighting for her love and to make things worse none of them were that great. There was very little character development which made the characters just ok for me. I didn’t love any of them in particular and so wasn’t really fussed who Lenah ended up with. The main relationship that Lenah does have happens very quickly over the period of a few weeks and when that’s done well in a book I don’t mind it but with Lenah and the guy in question I just wasn’t convinced they were the real deal. So after suffering through 300 pages of the above I get to the last 100 pages and that’s when things start to improve considerably. We finally get some action and the ending almost makes it worth getting through the first 300 pages. I won’t say too much about that but it definitely sets things up for a potentially better sequel. During the last 100 pages Rebecca Maizel really shows us what she’s capable of and I just hope that now with everything set up in Infinite days she’ll continue on along that path with the sequel. Her writing is really beautiful and this definitely has the potential to be a great series if she’d just cut out a few of the guys and work on adding some action and suspense through out the book instead of saving it all for the end. Over all I have to say that I was disappointed with this book because I was looking forward to it for so long and it just wasn’t what I expected it to be. It was an ok read though not something to rush out and buy so for that reason I’m giving it 3.5 stars. My Rating 3.5/5 stars ***1/2 Note on the UK Cover: I just wanted to leave a note about the UK edition of this book. The cover has an almost tracing paper like quality to it making it very easy to snag which happened to me - even though I’m a very careful reader - a few times leaving tiny tears in it. The model used also looks like she’s in her late twenties and doesn’t resemble a just turned 16 year old girl at all. After one very careful read of this book the covers crumpled and snagged, this book just isn’t very good quality at all. This is in no way Rebecca’s fault though which is why I didn’t want to include this in the actual review of the book but if your from the UK and are thinking about purchasing this book I’d advise you to try and hunt down the US copy – considering this is a hardcover it’s really not worth the money!