The Immortal Rules

The Immortal Rules by Julie Kagawa is what I would define as a vampire, post-apocalyptic, survival-horror. Set in a world where the human population has been decimated by a plague and the attempts of a cure. Human beings have been reduced to becoming bottom links on a food chain that leads up to soulless vampires and the devolved rapids. There is no democracy, no human Government, and no civil society; what once was has now become a country filled with ghost towns and walled up cities where vampires rule the streets and rapids roam the outer wilderness.

Allison Sekemoto is an unregistered inhabitant of the vampire city New Covington. She, like almost every one of her generation, is an orphan and the only family she has are the boys in her group of invisibles who survive by stealing and foraging for anything that aids in their survival. And however hard life was for Allison and her group before it's getting harder as food becomes scarcer, winter approaches, and rumors spread of the vampires locking down the city. A problem Allison had miraculously found a solution to, but one that quickly leads to tragedy and Allison dead.

The Immortal Rules is a story starkly different from Julie Kagawa'sThe Iron Fey series in both plot and format. Where the protagonist of The Iron King (the first novel in the Iron Fey series) had a clear set objective from the very beginning – save her kidnapped brother, Allison's story does not have a clear narrative path for the reader to follow, at least not until midway through the book. I had no problem with this for the majority of the novel because I prefer character-centric stories and the story of The Immortal Rules was mainly about Allison – her struggles of balancing what she is with who she was.

“The shadows lengthened like grasping fingers, sliding over the ground.”

Julie Kagawa's

The Immortal Rules

The Immortal Rules