Night School by C.J. Daugherty

Night School by C.J. Daugherty

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I always enjoy boarding school books (unless they’re contemporary, in which case I tend to run away screaming), and I’d hoped Night School would be a fine addition to the group, or in the best case scenario, that it would stand out in some way. Sadly, it’s not special at all, and it’s not even paranormal like I’d expected. It has the structure and the tropes of a paranormal YA novel, but no paranormal elements whatsoever. Consider yourselves warned.

Allie is a very troubled teen. After her older brother ran away from home, she started acting out and being completely out of control. She even got arrested a couple of times. When she gets herself expelled from yet another school for vandalism, her parents decide to take drastic measures. They send her to Cimmeria School, a very prestigious and very private boarding school located two hours’ drive from London.

Cimmeria is not your ordinary school. Students are all extremely talented and very rich, the program is highly demanding, and they get certain liberties and luxuries they wouldn’t get anywhere else. The school has many rules and failure to follow them always results in dire punishment, but one rule is most important of all: if you’re not invited to join Night School, don’t ask questions about it, don’t try to identify students who are in it and don’t ever, under any circumstances, try to disrupt Night School activities. Allie adapts to her life very easily, but she soon starts investigating odd things that are happening in Cimmeria, with the help of a few friends and her boyfriend.

Technically, Daugherty’s writing has no major flaws. There are no rough transitions, confusing or repetitive sentence structure, no naked dialogue, no telling instead of showing. The problem was entirely in the content.

Cliché after cliché after cliché, that’s what Night School has to offer, with the addition of some very disturbing details. The love triangle takes up a good part of the book, but it’s not just any love triangle: it’s about a difficult choice between the guy who’s been nothing but sweet and supportive and honest and the guy who got Allie drunk and tried to date-rape her on their first (and last) date. (But he is handsome and disgustingly rich and FRENCH!) Wow. How anyone could ever choose between them, I have no idea.

The way Allie changed from very problematic to obedient and hardworking the second she set foot in Cimmeria didn’t sit well with me. It takes a little more than a new school uniform and two gorgeous boys to fix those kinds of problems, and yet, Allie got better overnight. Her character was very inconsistent and it was clear to me that C.J. Daugherty doesn’t know the first thing about issues behind such behavior. It bothered me immensely that she didn’t approach the subject seriously enough.

In my opinion, she also failed to create tension in her story. More time was wasted on the love triangle drama and on the summer ball then on the main story line. Needless to say, when the big revelation came, it was very anticlimactic and it made very little sense. All this led to an unsatisfactory ending that really wasn’t an ending at all. It was almost like someone cut out the last chapter. There was no real climax and nothing was resolved at all.

Some of my friends on GoodReads rated this book very highly and I’m pretty sure it will have many more fans. Maybe I’m just getting tired of reading the same story over and over again.