The Immortal Rules by Julie Kagawa

Title: The Immortal Rules (Blood of Eden #1)

Author: Julie Kagawa

Publisher: Harlequin Teen

Release Date: April 24, 2012

Source: ARC from Publisher

Buy the Book: Amazon / Book Depository

In a future world, Vampires reign. Humans are blood cattle. And one girl will search for the key to save humanity.

Allison Sekemoto survives in the Fringe, the outermost circle of a vampire 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 is attacked--and given the ultimate choice. Die or become one of the monsters.

Faced with her own mortality, Allie becomes what she despises most. To survive, she must learn the rules of being immortal, including the most important: go long enough without human blood, and you will go mad.

Then Allie is forced to flee into the unknown, outside her city walls. There she joins a ragged band of humans who are seeking a legend--a possible cure to the disease that killed off most of humankind and created the rabids, the mindless creatures who threaten humans and vampires alike.

But it isn't easy to pass for human. Especially no around Zeke, who might see past the monster inside her. And Allie soon must decide what--and who--is worth dying for.

I love vampires, dystopians and Julie Kagawa so you can imagine how excited I was to have all that thrown together into one book. Let me just say that The Immortal Rules was absolutely fantastic. There was nothing not to love about this book, and I already wish I had more to read.

All her life Allison has hated vampires. Vampires are the reason her mother is dead and the reason Allison has been living in the Fringe and doing everything she can to stay alive. And she's barely doing so. But then she gets attacked by rabid vampires and is given the option either to die or stay alive as a vampire. And Allie, not wanting to die,  chooses to become everything she hates in order to stay alive. With the help of her new mentor, Allie learns what it means to live as a vampire. But soon enough, Allison is forced to run away from everything she knows and finds herself joining with a group of humans searching for a legend. And Allie will soon have to test just how human she is and how much of a monster she is.

I can't even begin to express how much I loved this book. The entire premise made me a little doubtful at first but Julie Kagawa definitely pulled it off. She presented a world that was dominated by vampires where humans lived in fear and that felt completely real. Everything Julie Kagwa described I could easily picture. The other thing I loved about The Immortal Rules is that despite the length, it never felt like the story was lagging. There was always something happening and the story really captivated me from start to finish. And let me just say that during the last 150 pages or so my heart just kept breaking over and over again. By the time I finished the book, I just wanted more.

A lot of the book focused on the idea of humanity and what it means to be human. That whole debate made Allison's character very interesting. At the beginning of the book Allie was a human teenage girl who lived a hard life, struggling to survive. Then she became a vampire and worried about becoming a monster. But then as the story progressed, it was almost as if being a vampire made Allie more human than she ever was as a human. It was like worrying about becoming a monster made her start to care more about the people around her than she ever did before. And I loved seeing that whole transformation happen in Allison, especially around Zeke, but I don't want to say too much. Just know that you will inevitably be rooting for Zeke and Allison.

The Immortal Rules was a fantastic read. Julie Kagawa wrote the start to what promises to be an amazing new series and I absolutely cannot wait to find out what will happen next.