4 stars

Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

In the Forests of the Night

Delacorte Press

1999

ISBN 0-385-32674-2

Risika lives in a world of kill or be killed, eat or be eaten: such is the way of the vampire-kind. But encroaching on the territory of one of the few vampires older and more powerful than she brings her to a turning point in her existence. Her memories of her human life and her survival as a vampire, and her reflections on her own nature, alternate and resonate with her experience of the present: the humans she observes but studiously avoids; Tora, the tiger who has won her trust; and Aubrey, consummate manipulator -- the one person she bears a grudge.

Risika is drawn as a careful balance of cool and sympathetic: her experiences over time take her from reluctant vampire to a creature who fully accepts her nature. The detachment necessary for survival in her world, however, has not destroyed her ability to care. Indeed, her remaining reluctance to number herself among the monsters provides much of the driving force and tension for the novel -- something Risika herself only gradually comes to realize.

Reviews of IN THE FORESTS OF THE NIGHT tend to stress its author's age: at fourteen, she is a young adult novelist in every sense. But communicating the passion and pain of adolescence takes more than being there. This coming-of-age book speaks to the universal with a poem's lyric economy of language. In fact, IN THE FORESTS OF THE NIGHT at times suffers from an excess of conciseness and verbal foreshortening, but this is a flaw easily forgiven in the phantasmagorical world Atwater-Rhodes has built. It is not a friendly world, but even its coldness is compelling.

Catherine B. Krusberg