Review: Infinite Days by Rebecca Maizel

Title: Infinite Days
Author: Rebecca Maizel
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Publication Date: August 3, 2010
Series: Vampire Queen #1
Links: Amazon | Goodreads
Source: Goodreads First Reads

Lenah Beaudonte is, in many ways, your average teen: the new girl at Wickham Boarding School, she struggles to fit in enough to survive and stand out enough to catch the eye of the golden-boy lacrosse captain. But Lenah also just happens to be a recovering five-hundred-year-old vampire queen. After centuries of terrorizing Europe, Lenah is able to realize the dream all vampires have -- to be human again. After performing a dangerous ritual to restore her humanity, Lenah entered a century-long hibernation, leaving behind the wicked coven she ruled over and the eternal love who has helped grant her deep-seated wish.

Until, that is, Lenah draws her first natural breath in centuries at Wickham and rediscovers a human life that bears little resemblance to the one she had known. As if suddenly becoming a teenager weren’t stressful enough, each passing hour brings Lenah closer to the moment when her abandoned coven will open the crypt where she should be sleeping and find her gone. As her borrowed days slip by, Lenah resolves to live her newfound life as fully as she can. But, to do so, she must answer ominous questions:  Can an ex-vampire survive in an alien time and place? What can Lenah do to protect her new friends from the bloodthirsty menace about to descend upon them? And how is she ever going to pass her biology midterm?

Being a little over the whole mass of vampire books that seem to have spewed forth recently, I was skeptical about what this one would be like and did not have high expectations or hopes. 

I was pleasantly surprised once I started reading it. I like Lenah. She isn't the standard frail, naive female protagonist that has been showing up in paranormal. She has experiences and regrets and sorrows which made her quite the opposite of naive, and she is smart. Yet she'd never experienced being a normal teenager. I find her character to be intriguing - a ruthless vampire trying to regain her humanity. 

The writing is not bad, and the dialogue is believable for the most part. There is one scene in particular, though, in which the conversation is too presumptuous and cliché for me, but other than making me roll my eyes it didn't take too much away from my interest in the story. Infinite Days is written in first person past, so it is though Lenah is telling the reader her story. The style feels consistent with what I would expect to hear if Lenah were actually sitting here telling it to me.

There are some choices that the author makes in the last parts of the book that I like because they are difficult. Some people may not like them, but I do (the end in particular). There is one, though, that I thought was a little convenient (in the form of a "gift") and was too deus ex machina for me, but in this I am perhaps being overly picky, because I don't feel like it ruined anything necessarily, only that it was too easy for me to like as much as I would have if it had been more complicated. This book is the first in a trilogy, and it did leave me interested in reading the second one, curious to see what is coming. After the way that this one ends I don't have much of an idea as to what could possibly come next.