Night School - Review

Title: Night School
Author: C. J. Daugherty
Part of a Series? The first book in the Night School series.
Synopsis (from Goodreads) : Allie Sheridan’s world is falling apart. Her brother’s run away from home. Her parents ignore her. And she’s just been arrested.
Again.
This time her parents have had enough. They cut her off from her friends and send her away to boarding school, far from her London friends.
But at Cimmeria Academy, Allie is soon caught up in the strange activities of a secret group of elite students.
When she’s attacked late one night the incident sets off a chain of increasingly violent events. As the school begins to seem like a very dangerous place, she finds out that nothing at Cimmeria is what it seems to be.
And that she is not who she thought she was.
Rating: 3 stars.

For some reason I thought this would be about the supernatural. Heads up: it isn't! Night School is definitely a book that got better as I read on. To start with, I wasn’t overly impressed; it had quite a few features that are found in lots of other books – a boarding school, a mean girl, a love triangle. However, some of these changed or were resolved later on in the novel, which improved it.  

Night School also felt like such a set up for the next book! There wasn’t as much action as I had hoped, although more happens towards the end of the book, but the building of the world of Cimmeria Academy was good. I especially liked the settings, like the chapel and the library.

Allie was a really likeable main character. She was strong, but not all the time, made mistakes, and was funny. This made me root for her throughout the book, as she was so realistic. In fact, most of the characters felt realistic, and it was interesting how the relationships between different characters were never 100% clear, which added to the whole mystery around Night School. Carter as a love interest was good too, but it did feel like he told Allie off far too much! More than that, he told her what to do a lot, which kind of annoyed me, but these moments weren’t too common. And Slyvain kind of felt unnecessary until the last few chapters of the book, but not in a way that completely made me want to stop reading.

Overall, I gave this book three out of five stars. It was quite entertaining, with fun, fast-paced dialogue, but there were parts that I didn’t enjoy. I would recommend Night School to people who like books set in boarding schools, as Cimmeria Academy seems like a great boarding school and you’re really immersed in the little Cimmeria world. I also think that Night School would be a good book for people who are trying to get into YA or who want to get back into reading.