The Immortal Rules by Julie Kagawa

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


From the cover: "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 not around Zeke, who might see past the monster inside her. And Allie soon must decide what--and who--is worth dying for.


I am a big fan of Julie Kagawa. I loved her Iron Fey series, and I am looking forward to reading the spin-off, but I couldn’t help but compare The Immortal Rules to other popular books. This book was great and I thought the characters were complex but I couldn’t stop making comparisons.

Here are the issues that bugged me the most:

1. Any fan of the Morganville Vampires by Rachel Caine will immediately relate Kagawa’s blood bank/vampire society to the Morganville Vamps.

2. The idea of scavenging and finding the hidden underground food cache is eerily reminiscent of a scene in The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

3. The new female vampire who ends up being a Type-2 in the vampire hierarchy, and wields a katana reminds me too much of Merit from the Chicagoland Vampire series by Chloe Neill.

With that said I’ll probably read the next book in the series because I did like the characters, and I am interested enough to want to find out what happened. I think Zeke is my favorite. He has some pretty strong false fanatical ideas that were practically beat into him and I love the way he came to trust Allie even though she represents everything that he is against. Even though this story wasn’t completely original I liked it enough that I will read the next book.




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