In the Forests of the Night
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- £3.49
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- £3.49
Publisher Description
I was born to the name of Rachel Weatere in the year 1684, more than three hundred years ago.
The one who changed me named me Risika, and Risika I became, though I never asked what it meant. I continue to call myself Risika, even though I was transformed into what I am against my will.
By day, Risika sleeps in a shaded room in Concord, Massachusetts. By night, she hunts the streets of New York City. She is used to being alone.
But now someone is following Risika. Someone has left her a black rose, the same sort of rose that sealed her fate three hundred years ago.
Three hundred years ago Risika had a family -- a brother and a sister who loved her. Three hundred years ago she was human.
Now she is a vampire, a powerful one. And her past has come back to torment her.
This atmospheric, haunting tale marks the stunning debut of a promising fourteen-year-old novelist.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First-novelist Atwater-Rhodes writes astonishingly well--considering that she completed the manuscript for this vampire novel when she was only 13 years old (she's now 15). Even compared with many adult authors, she's skillful at building atmosphere, insightful in creating characters and imaginative in varying and expanding on vampire lore. The sophisticated structure flashes between a 300-year-old vampire named Risika and her previous, human existence as one Rachel Weatere. The weaknesses in this venture, however, point to the author's youth. Risika's world-weary profundities have the ring of easy, adolescent cynicism (e.g., while visiting a favorite animal at a zoo, Risika says, " even cage themselves, though their bars are made of society, not steel"). Characters wander in and out of the story; a climactic showdown between Risika and her archenemy depends more on telling than on showing; and an 11th-hour surprise, though neatly planted, strains the narrative logic. But with the popularity of books such as Annette Curtis Klause's The Silver Kiss and TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed, this precocious debut will likely find fans. Ages 12-up.
