Burned (House of Night, #7) in Once Upon a Twilight blog

Dec 31, 2010 Lyndsey O'Halloran rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: ya

I had initially put off buying this book as the copies that I own of the rest of the series have coloured pages and this one doesn’t. I really don’t like sets if they don’t match but the publishers told me that the coloured page edition hasn’t been decided upon yet. So with that in mind, I realised I could be waiting a long time and with book #8 out soon, I decided not to wait any longer.

I had actually quite forgotten what had happened in the previous book, Tempted, so some strong emotions abou I had initially put off buying this book as the copies that I own of the rest of the series have coloured pages and this one doesn’t. I really don’t like sets if they don’t match but the publishers told me that the coloured page edition hasn’t been decided upon yet. So with that in mind, I realised I could be waiting a long time and with book #8 out soon, I decided not to wait any longer.

I had actually quite forgotten what had happened in the previous book, Tempted, so some strong emotions about Zoey and Heath suddenly came back to me. I was sad at the beginning of the book and was really hoping that things were going to at least get a little bit happier this time around. I was half right. I was so happy to see that Zoey wasn’t quite the idiot she has been in the past. Stuck in the Otherworld, Zoey is utterly shattered at the death of her human consort, Heath, and I don’t blame her for one second. I loved Heath and this certainly wasn’t the way in which I wanted his story to go. Zoey really doesn’t deal with heartbroken well and even though I have hated her in the past for having too many guys on the go, I couldn’t hate her this time. I really ended up feeling sorry for both her and Heath being stuck in the Otherworld and not knowing what to do.

Stark was another character that I loved as soon as he appeared and in Burned, he only gets better! One of the things that annoy me about the other characters in this series is their language. It is really immature and silly for the most part but Stark isn’t like the rest of them. Stark’s language is actually pretty bad and by bad, I mean great! The back cover of the book does state that it is not suitable for younger readers and that is completely right. Stark has quite a foul mouth but I didn’t think this type of language was over done at any point. He has just lost Zoey and is quite destroyed so I thought it was only natural for him to hit out and swearing at everyone seemed to be how he did that. If that had been me in his position, I would have told everyone to F**k off as well.

I loved the whole plot of Burned and the direction in which it is heading. The story moved along at a very strange pace though, due to how it was told. Burned is the first book in the series where multiple POV’s are used the whole way through even though Tempted saw this being introduced towards the end of the book. Even though I liked hearing from other characters, especially Stark and Rephaim, I didn’t like the way the chapters were laid out. Some chapters saw POVs from different characters which was fine, but then there were chapters solely from one person’s POV. I wouldn’t have minded this if it had just stated the character at the beginning of that chapter but it wasn’t. One chapter, for example, is only told from Stevie Rae’s POV but it is broken into three parts. I didn’t understand why this was done at all because it made no sense to break it up. Even though that annoyed me, I did like knowing what was going on with everyone else while Zoey was stuck without her soul.

Burned is a fantastic read, apart from a few small niggles that I had. Luckily, those niggles weren’t with the story itself or with the characters this time around. I think Zoey is finally beginning to grow up, even if I cant say the same for her friends, and I am really looking forward to seeing what happens in the next book, Awakened.
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