Hunted or more like Obsessed With Shirtless Boys

Condensed, edited version taken from my blog.

Not long ago I finished reading the fifth instalment in the Cast's House of Night Series, Hunted.

This is about the point where I give a frustrated sigh. Oh my, is it a frustrated sigh.

First of, there is a story in there somewhere. An interesting story that could potentially make a good novel but it's been swallowed by chaotic, repetitive, stereotypical, shallow muck. I really hope that this novel is only the stepping stone to another part of the story because if this is setting the tone for the future of the series then it's going to get far worse.
Not that the previous novels in the series were master pieces with the repetition, stereotyping and all the other faults but it was interesting and the main story wasn't lost or marred as much by all the triviality. Plus the characters changed and you didn't always know who was bad and who was good.

The book continues on from the last quite well with Zoey recounting how they made it to their particular location. That part isn't too bad because you expect a bit of explanation about the previous novels in the series but soon you realise that doesn't stop there, it carries on but with the present novel. Through out the story, almost all the characters, have to explain everything that has happened to each other repeatedly. There's no short catch up explaining the main character just caught whoever up on the news so the reader doesn't have to read it over and over again. No, none of that.
Then there is the obsession with the gay characters. I'm bisexual, I love gay characters but that doesn't mean we have to be reminded every few lines or have the reference "gay this" and "gay that" so much.
It's fine if it's just pointed out that there's a gay couple but it's followed by more "gay" comments about them cooking, squealing etcetera with gay tacked in front of it and at some point in the previous novels I started to wonder if the writer was giving her self a pat on the back because she included homosexual characters and wanted to make sure we knew.
Just like she had to make sure we knew everything else by explaining it to us. For instance, words (damn it, write a dictionary if you want to explain words), the storyline (over and over and over and over....), how hot everyone is or at least how perfect and then there's the love triangles.
This is one of the main things that takes away from the interesting story and just turns it into being about boys and the character being a whingy, whimpy idiot. She can't seem to make up her mind about any boys that she likes and guess what? All the hot guys want a piece of her and so far there is really only one guy who isn't considered hot. So most of the story is her obsessing over all these boys and what she is going to do about them when the world as she knows it is coming to an end and everyone is in danger.

Way to get the priorities sorted.

If you knew nothing about teenagers (maybe you slept through your teen years and then have been living on Mars since) and this was your only reference to them then you'd come away thinking they were boy obsessed, daft (because the characters take a long time to figure things out), have bad memories because they repeat themselves so much, are really, really shallow and that teenage girls can go around cheating on their boyfriends, stringing boys along and eventually getting away with it because the boys will still love them.

So basically it was entertaining trash given the underlying story but really annoying at the same time. Not that I'm really annoyed with the story, it's the authors that have done my head in so I'll be reading the next one because I want to know what happens with the bigger picture and to see if this is only a transition novel.