(3 Stars)
Silent Nights Book Two
by Kaila Gant

Kira is a teenaged vampire just graduated from high school. Her dad is a police officer. Her mom points out that there’s food in the fridge, “unless you’ve already had, um, dinner.” Drake, Viola, Gregory and Isaiah are also vampires and they’re all on a mission to find the killer of Isaiah’s brother, Dagar.

Who can kill a vampire? Elves, apparently. With the help of a rebel elf named Sabrey, the team passes through the portal separating the two worlds. What a difference! Here, there is light, radiant beauty, shining surfaces. The vampires are transformed themselves, even acquiring heartbeats to which they listen rapturously. How could such a resplendent, diaphanous world create the emotions necessary to commit cold-blooded murder? And, why would native Sabrey expose it?

All good questions, which author Kaila Gant answers with subtly executed twists of her pen in the final chapters of the book. Gant also excels at swathing a normal teenaged world with the supernatural. A teenager herself, Gant’s vampire creations for the most part talk and act like teenagers. They squabble over possessions, are concerned about AIDs, complain about clothes and claw at each other to get near the leader of the pack. Gant’s writing skills are also decidedly adolescent: sentence structure is repetitive, verbs often awkward and the characters speak informally even to the Queen.

The second book in Gant’s series, Silent Nights, this book picks up where the last left off, and leaves us just as abruptly. While the ending is a thrilling cliffhanger, Gant should be reminded that even J. K. Rowlings saw fit (until the penultimate book in the series) to play a little catch-up for readers with faulty memories or joining late. This reader’s ignorance of the first book left many basic questions unanswered, like, why are the vampires the good guys?

Even so, Silent Nights is a series young teens will enjoy—and it may even motivate them to flatter Ms. Gant in the most sincere of manners, but producing their own works of supernatural fiction.

Ordering Information for Silent Nights Book Two
Return to Book Reviews Home