Book Review: The Immortal Rules by Julie Kagawa

Title: The Immortal Rules
Author: Julie Kagawa
Genre: Young Adult, Vampires, Distyopian
Series: Blood of Eden #1
Publisher: Harlequin Teen
Pub Date: April 24, 2012
My Copy: Hardcover that has been in my To Be Read Pile
Pages: 485

Book Synopsis: 

To survive in a ruined world, she must embrace the darkness

Allison Sekemoto survives in the Fringe, the outermost circle of a walled-in 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 dies and becomes one of the monsters.

Forced to flee her city, Allie must pass for human as she joins a ragged group of pilgrims seeking a legend-a place that might have a cure for the disease that killed off most of civilization and created the rabids, the bloodthirsty creatures who threaten human and vampire alike. And soon Allie will have to decide what and who is worth dying for again.

Book Review:

A decadent, dark delight that I couldn’t put down. I couldn’t put it down. I found it to be very original, dark, and very different from the other distyopians that I’ve read. Loved this book, and it’s wonderfully dark sometimes grim reality of what humans and vampires have to endure.

The main character is really different in the fact that she does what she has to do for survival. I like the fact that we get to know the main character when she is human. It makes us the audience actually develop some sympathy and understand how the world is not favorable to humans at all. Humans have to be careful about surviving in a world where they are the prey and used as nothing but vampire’s play things or something far worse, rabids, who are a mutated form of the vampire, but savagely feral and will kill human beings. 

Allison does what she must in order to keep herself and the group she’s with alive and away from vampires, because they are unregistered humans. Unregistered humans are always living in a precarious state of living. It’s survival as they are looking for food and other things as well. Also if unregistered humans are caught, they are killed, used as blood banks or made to be pets to the vampires. This is a very scary thought. What I loved about the first part of the book was that Allison was doing everything that she could to survive. 

The group manages for a while to survive, until one night changes everything. This night forever shatters and alters Allison’s very existence. Her very existence is altered when she sacrifices herself for the two other members of her group to get away when the rabids-mutant vampires decide to attack them. She holds them off as long as she can and gets very badly hurt. Then a vampire helps her, yet the vampire gives her a choice, but it isn’t much of one really. She either dies or returns as a vampire. Ally makes the only choice that she can, and that’s to become a vampire.

Once a vampire, things changed a lot for Allison in this book. Kanin seems to have a very good understanding and is an excellent teacher to Allison. He also explains the rules of vampire society to her. These rules will become important later on in the series, as there is a ruling order to their society and the city of New Covington. New Covington is ruled by vampires, but some vampires like Kanin and Allison are unregistered, which means they are kind of like outlaws in their own society.

There seems to be a period where Kanin teaches Allison to read, do mathematics, also learn how to use a Katana sword. Learning how to use the Katana sword is important as it will help her defend herself against rabids, humans and especially other vampires. The training she does with the sword is intense, but he teaches her so much that you can’t but want to know more about Allison’s sire Kanin and we do it in pieces and tidbits. These tidbits come at a very interesting point.

Things get so much more intense as some stuff happens with other vampires and humans becoming involved in the mix. Kanin gets captured but Allison escapes into the wilderness not knowing what’s out there as she has never been anywhere other than New Covington. The wilderness is quite a scary place. Yet she finds that the wilderness is just as dangerous, maybe even more so. There are gangs and other human beings.

Allison pretends to be human because it sometimes is easier to blend in and it will help her own chances for survival. Yet the humans she is traveling with are also trying to cope with things and also find a new home. Yet, it will provide Allison with a good cover. Things get complicated along the way. Nothing ever goes as planned. People get hurt, die, the gang she encountered earlier on in the book comes back.

The gang in the wilderness causes an unexpected problem as they capture some of the humans she was worth. We find out a whole lot of things that we as the reader go…Oh boy…didn’t expect that. One of the humans may possess the keys to curing rabidism, but it’s not true, his father was merely working on it. His knowledge was to be passed down, but didn’t pass it all down. There are other things to, the leader of the gang is another vampire that Kanin, her sire made.

An intense fight breaks out between Allison and Jackal. It was a really good fight. She almost loses if not for someone interfering in that fight. Yet the visions she has of her sire are really good and brings us back to the fact that Kanin needs some rescuing as well. Allison agrees to help the group get to where they are going. She does that, but is quickly kicked out of New Eden because of what she is.

Yet Allison has decided that she will be going to rescue Kanin. That means going back to New Covington. So I’m looking forward to reading The Eternity Cure to find out what happens next.

Rating: