Hex Hall by Rachel Hawkins - Book Review #25

Hex Hall

by Rachel Hawkins

Three years ago, Sophie Mercer discovered that she was a witch. It's gotten her into a few scrapes. Her non-gifted mother has been as supportive as possible, consulting Sophie's estranged father--an elusive European warlock--only when necessary. But when Sophie attracts too much human attention for a prom-night spell gone horribly wrong, it's her dad who decides her punishment: exile to Hex Hall, an isolated reform school for wayward Prodigium, a.k.a. witches, faeries, and shapeshifters.

By the end of her first day among fellow freak-teens, Sophie has quite a scorecard: three powerful enemies who look like supermodels, a futile crush on a gorgeous warlock, a creepy tagalong ghost, and a new roommate who happens to be the most hated person and only vampire on campus. Worse, Sophie soon learns that a mysterious predator has been attacking students, and her only friend is the number-one suspect.

As a series of blood-curdling mysteries starts to converge, Sophie prepares for the biggest threat of all: an ancient secret society determined to destroy all Prodigium, especially her.

From goodreads.com

Hex Hall is easy, fast and light-headed story, which will reward you with a wide grin on your face for reading it. After finishing this book, I got a feeling that it was written with mathematical preciseness of a solid novel. It had just the right amount of description and back-story. Plot twists happened just at the right moment. It ended perfectly with a good enough cliffhanger, which makes you want to read the second book, but defiantly not in the middle of the story. Writing was strong, satisfying and very nicely edited. All this mathematical preciseness would let me to the thought that this story would be predictable, but surprisingly it wasn’t, at least not for me, at least not completely.

By the synopsis I thought that probably Rachel Hawkins bit off more than she can chew with Hex Hall – it seems overwhelmingly a lot to cover in a three hundred pages novel. However, once again, I was up for a surprise. In my opinion, Rachel Hawkins successfully manages all the different species – witches, vampires, shapeshifter, faeries and even ghosts in the novel. She also managed a quite large story of family secrets and legacies, new school, the need to fit in, quite recently discovered abilities, friendship, romance and murder mystery.

The only thing that I didn’t like about Hex Hall – it strongly reminded me of a lot of other, very popular books. Sometimes it felt like a good compiled mix of those books. However, I really don’t want to talk about it, because, let’s face it, there are no original ideas and the key is only in execution of these ideas, which in the Hex Hall case was done, as I already said, marvelously.

I cannot wait for the sequel Demonglass, which is scheduled for publication in March 2011.