Rainy Days and Pajamas: Review: Hunted by P.C. & Kristin Cast

Title: Hunted

Author: P.C. & Kristin Cast

Series: House of Night #5

Version Reviewed: Finished, Hardback

GoodReads Summary:

What if the hottest guy in the world was hiding a nameless evil, and all he wanted was you?
At the start of this heart-pounding new installment of the bestselling House of Night series, Zoey’s friends have her back again and Stevie Rae and the red fledglings aren’t Neferet’s secrets any longer. But an unexpected danger has emerged. Neferet guards her powerful new consort, Kalona, and no one at the House of Night seems to understand the threat he poses. Kalona looks gorgeous, and he has the House of Night under his spell. A past life holds the key to breaking his rapidly spreading influence, but what if this past life shows Zoey secrets she doesn’t want to hear and truths she can’t face?
On the run and holed up in Tulsa’s Prohibition-era tunnels, Zoey and her gang must discover a way to deal with something that might bring them all down. Meanwhile, Zoey has a few other little problems. The red fledglings have cleaned up well – they’ve even managed to make the dark, creepy tunnels feel more like home – but are they really as friendly as they seem? On the boyfriend front, Zoey has a chance to make things right with super-hot ex-, Erik, but she can’t stop thinking about Stark, the archer who died in her arms after one unforgettable night, and she is driven to try to save him from Neferet’s sinister influence at all costs. Will anyone believe the power evil has to hide among us?

Honestly, I was eager to begin Hunted. With the end of the last installment in the series, things were left rocky, horrible, and confusing. So I couldn't wait to delve deeper into the next novel to find out exactly how Zoey and all the other fledglings would manage to get themselves out of this mess.

I won't lie, the first couple of chapters were a little boring to me, but I was still hooked and could not quit reading chapter after chapter. I was very curious to see how all these fledglings would handle themselves, minus the aid of adult vampyres. It was very interesting to find that they had seemed to create their own little town, their own world beneath and there were honestly a couple parts that had my pulse racing a little faster and my brain begging to know what was going to happen next. I found myself really not wanting anything bad to happen to any of these characters.

I do have to say though, that some of the situations Zoey is put it are getting a little exhausting. We're stuck getting aggravated at her and multiple male characters again as Zoey's boy trouble continue to be a problem in the world of the House of Night. I found myself begging her to just put some of these characters out of their misery and just (freaking) move on (already).

Another thing I wasn't very happy about is the backtrack to previous novels. In Untamed, novel number four, it seems like most of the "immature" language and childish ways of speaking were mostly gone. Every now and then we caught a glimpse of Zoey's kiddish words, but it wasn't overly annoying. In this novel,Hunted, we're thrown right back into it. With words like "bullpoopie", it seems Zoey's refusal to use cuss words is thrown back into third grade. Even the characters in the novel constantly bring it up and terrorize her over it. (How many times do we need to read one character telling her it's okay to cuss sometimes?). The continuity of this gets a little tiresome.

I also noticed that around the middle of the novel, there seemed to be quite a bit of typos and mistakes. Numerous times Darius' name was used when the character's were referring to Damien and Darius was nowhere near them. And there were a few punctuation errors too. Quotation marks that were put in the middle of paragraphs where characters had clearly not stopped speaking. I do not hold this against anyone though because I am the queen of the backspace button (I hit it four times in this sentence already). People make mistakes and sometimes there are just ridiculous typos that no one seems to notice until it's already too late. I go back numerous times after I have published a post to fix something that I never noticed until I threw it out there for the world to see.

All in all, there was some repetition in Hunted that I did not enjoy as much, but the novel itself was really good. I enjoyed it and would read it again. I have to repeat what I said about the last novel; the further you read into this series, the better the books get.

And I absolutely loved the ending to this novel. I found it very touching and even went back and re-read parts of it.

Memorable Quotes:

"Remember how you said if you'd been Rose you would really never have let him go? Okay, well, let's do a little reenactment. I'm the gay-looking DiCaprio and you're Rose. You have to keep your eyes open and on my face, or you'll have let me go and I'll turn into a huge gay Popsicle."