Night School by C.J. Daugherty

Title: Night School
Author: C.J. Daugherty
Release Date: May 21, 2013
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books
Source: Edelweiss DRC
Genre(s): YA Fiction, YA Thriller, Boarding Schools, Secret Societies

Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Review Spoilers: Mild
GoodReads | Amazon

I don’t k now why GoodReads lists this as a ‘paranormal romance’ featuring ‘vampires.’ Because there is nothing paranormal about the book and there are certainly no vampires. I guess there’s romance but honestly. GoodReads lied to me. I went into this book erroneously thinking that there would be vampires and there were none. I was sorely disappointed. But that’s not the book’s fault.

Since the book doesn’t really play into any of the genres we covered here on Nerdophiles I almost decided not to review it. But I read it so… yeah. I’m going to review it anyway.

While Night School might be coming out today here in the US, UK-based readers have been able to enjoy two books in the series so far with a third on the way sometimes toward the end of the year. But don’t let that fool you. C.J. Daugherty is all American – or at least she was once. Though she was born in Texas she’s now a subject of her Majesty the Queen which explains the setting.

Night School is set in a particularly unusual boarding school in the English country side where Allie Sheridan is sent after a series of arrests. Her parents, seemingly desperate for her to get her life back together, hope that the rigid structure of the school’s curriculum will help their daughter. But there is much more going on in this school than you would expect.

… you just don’t really get a chance to start discovering what is going on until about sixty or seventy percent through the book.

It focuses mostly on Allie as she navigates her way through this new, strange boarding school. A city girl, she’s not sure she’ll take to the country well – especially not in a place she can’t use her cellphone or any computers. But she makes friends and studies and sort of starts to realize that, yeah, while the school is a bit weird it’s starting to feel like home. There’s the very attractive French exchange student, Sylvain, whose taken an interest in her. She’s got a best friend in Joe and has gotten in with Lisa, Lucas, Ruth, Gabe, and the others. She had a group. She has friends. Even the brooding but obviously hot Carter pays attention to her though she doesn’t know what he’s up to any more than she knows what ‘Night School’ means or any of the school’s other secrets.

As the book goes along she finds herself picking up on the weird goings on around the school. But it isn’t until the school dance when something terrible happens that she starts to discover what’s going on. Since that’s literally like… three-fourths of the way through the book you have to wait a long time to get any sort of answers. Not that the book gives you any answers about anything. I actually liked the book for the most part (even though through all of it – even until the dance – I was expecting vampires to suddenly be a thing) but taking that long to even start revealing what ‘Night School’ – the thing the book is named after! – is a bit much.

But it’s not a bad book. It certainly sets up a really interesting premise for future books and I’m really interested to see how the secret societies introduced in the book and the influence of the school extends and develops. Hopefully Allie will learn some answers and find out the truth about her long lost brother. It just would have been nice to have some of these questions at least addressed more seriously in the first book. I feel like now I have to read the second book to have gotten much from the first!

Which I can’t do because it’s not out here yet! It’s frustrating. But don’t let that deter you from picking up Night School. It’s a quick, good read – though you’ll probably be happier with yourself if you wait until you can pick up the second book, too. I know I would have been. I just want to know things.