Book Review- Night School by C. J. Daugherty

Title: Night School

 Author:  C.J. Daugherty

Series:  Night School Series #1

Published:  5 January 2012 by Atom

Length: 451 pages

Warnings: violence, skinny dipping, nearly a violent/romantic (this is hard to describe) encounter, 14+

Source:  Publishers via Atomics

Other info: It is a series !  ( C&P from author, “The first book in the Night School series.
Published January 2012 by Atom”). And this is her debut work.

Summary : Sometimes school is murder. Allie Sheridan's world is falling apart. She hates her school. Her brother has run away from home. And she's just been arrested. Again. This time her parents have finally had enough. They cut her off from her friends and send her away to a boarding school for problem teenagers.
But Cimmeria Academy is no ordinary school. Its rules are strangely archaic. It allows no computers or phones. Its students are an odd mixture of the gifted, the tough and the privileged. And then there's the secretive Night School, whose activities other students are forbidden even to watch. When Allie is attacked one night the incident sets off a chain of events leading to the violent death of a girl at the summer ball. As the school begins to seem like a very dangerous place, Allie must learn who she can trust. And what's really going on at Cimmeria Academy.

Review: After her brother runs away and she’s arrested for the third time, Allie Sheridan is shipped off to Cimmeria Academy for a new chance. But everything is odd...there are no traces of the twenty first century, and the rules... who knows why some of them are in place? And then there’s the students... filthy rich Sylvain, bad (or maybe good) boy Carter, mysterious Jo and her boyfriend Gabe. Throw in a headmistress with plenty of secrets she’s trying to keep, and a dead girl at the ball, and soon Allie realises that trust is not going to be easy here at Cimmeria.

If you can’t call this mystery, I’m not sure what you can call it. Although the first bit was a bit boring, once we got to see a bit more of the school, I was guessing and wanting to keep going throughout. And some of these things don’t even get resolved. The titular Night School, we don’t ever find out exactly what they are and what they’re doing. I don’t think there’s any paranormal elements, but I’m still not sure. 

There’s the standard stock range of boarding-school types, with the bad boy, the rich one, the prefect, the really horrible girl... and they all had their own personalities. Most of them have something to hide, and new things about them all unfold at various parts of the story, adding depth and unpredictability.

The romance in it was actually done well. Kind of. It was good in that it actually moved the plot along, instead of just being a side story that could be removed without affecting the story at all. The romance with Sylvain was rather central to moving along, both for Allie’s development and to a slightly smaller extent, the general plot.

Allie definitely develops a lot. Along with finding things that maybe she should have left alone, she matures and starts understanding that trust is not something that should come easy.

Overall:  Strength 4 tea to a great start to a series full of intrigue. I definitely want to read the next book and see how events will unravel.

Links: | Goodreads | Author website |