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Claudia Gray is not the author’s real name, and she makes no bones about it on her website. If one reads the copyright page of Evernight, one will discover Ms. Gray’s real name, so it isn’t exactly a secret. Apparently she took the name for no reason at all. (Well, why not?) She lives in New York City and has worked the usual raft of Weird Writer Jobs — although ‘lawyer’ isn’t generally on that list. Evernight is her first novel; Stargazer, the sequel, comes out early in 2009, and there are two more books (Hourglass and Afterlife) to finish the quartet. Ms. Gray has also written two short stories to come out in anthologies shortly, and Evernight was a featured book in the (now-defunct) First Look Teen program of HarperCollins.

Bianca Olivier is shy — painfully, cripplingly shy. So when her parents decide to take a job at a posh but creepy boarding school quite a distance away — uprooting her entire life and forcing her to enter a new school her junior year of high school — she feels betrayed and lonely. She’s also destined to be an outsider. Just before school starts, she meets Lucas — also a new kid, as apparently the Evernight school has started letting scholarship students in. They form an instant connection, which is also Bianca’s first romance. However, the rest of the students in the school are profoundly weird and horrifically snobby, and Bianca is generally miserable. On top of that, strange things keep happening. What is going on at Evernight, and will Bianca ever fit in?

In so many ways, this is a stereotypical shy-girl-at-new-boarding-school story. Bianca is on-again, off-again friends with her roommate Patrice, who spends her summers in the Caribbean and Europe, and only has designer clothing. She has a nemesis in Courtney, who is one of the popular girls; Lucas fills the role of bad boy on whom Bianca has a crush. Another boy, one of the popular ones, named Balthazar (and he can pull it off), is interested in Bianca as well, and there’s a Goth girl floating in the background. The nemesis gets her come-uppance at one point; Lucas is generally unreliable; Patrice is rather patronizing; Balthazar looks amazing in formal clothing . . . etc. It’s changed in a couple ways, though. One I can’t mention, because there’s a Plot Twist (TM), and the other is because Bianca’s parents are teachers at the school, and rather than socially killing her, that fact makes her a little bit more popular than she would be otherwise.

Bianca, I felt, had an awfully realistic voice; she had many turns of phrases that sounded exactly right to my ear. Actually, they sounded precisely how I would say it, which perhaps means that Bianca sounds like a teenager from the late ’90s or a mid-twenties from now, but that’s so much better than some teenagers I could mention that I’ll count it as a success. I remember most that she inserts “kind of” into her sentences as a useless modifier — a phrase I have to edit out of nearly every one of my reviews. The other characters . . . sound how they should, generally. Many have rather formal modes of speaking, but it fits with their characters and life stories. Bianca’s parents seem generally fairly parental, and the other teachers fit well, too.

There are several twists in this plot, but unfortunately, I felt it was rather conventional overall. Once the first Big Plot Twist was revealed, I was almost disappointed, as I felt the explanation (and other parts of the backstory) wasn’t solid enough. There was nothing that I hadn’t seen before, and most of it wasn’t even particularly new. I can only hope that most of the reason for the lack of newness in the story is because it’s the first volume, and that there are many interesting things to come in future volumes. I will say that I enjoyed Ms. Gray’s writing and characters very much; I just wish she’d have some innovation to her plots, plot elements, and themes. I’d recommend it to fans of that book who want to read something much better written that may or may not have similar plot elements, as well as fans of Vampire Academy (hey, a boarding school is a boarding school, right?), although VA is much more innovative. 3.5/5 stars.