ARC Review: Red Moon Rising

Red Moon Rising by Peter Moore
Released: February 08, 2011
Published by: Hyperion Book CH
Pages: 336, Hardcover
Young Adult
Source: Publisher in exchange for honest review
Overall: 4 star- Fabulous!

Being only half-vamp in a high school like Carpathia Night makes you awhole loser. But Danny Gray manages to escape the worst of the specists at his school. Thanks to genetic treatments he had as an infant, most people assume Danny's other half is human. Which is a good thing.
Ever since the development of synthetic blood – SynHeme – vamps have become society’s elite, while wulves like his father work menial jobs and live in bad neighborhoods. Wulves are less than second class citizens; once a month they become inmates, forced to undergo their Change in dangerous government compounds.
For Danny, living with his vamp mother and going to a school with a nearly all-vamp student body, it’s best to pretend his wulf half doesn’t even exist. But lately Danny's been having some weird symptoms — fantastic night vision; a keener-than-usual sense of smell; and headaches, right around the full moon.
Even though it's easy to be in denial, it's hard to ignore evidence. There's only a month until the next few moon, and Danny's time is running out.
Peter Moore speaks to adolescents in a voice that will have them laughing, set in a world that will get them thinking.

My thoughts:

When I picked up Red Moon Rising my fears were that I would be getting another run-of-the-mill werewolf story.  It wouldn't have been a bad thing, I just wasn't expecting anything as quirky as Peter Moore gave us.

Told from a teenage boys point of view, we are already one upping lots of YA paranormal reads available.  No matter how you look at it, the workings of a teenage boys brain and that of a teenage girl are going to different.  The emotions, their boiling points, their ability to react and how they view the world.  Danny, our main character, is not only a teenage boy but also part-wulf making him part of the lowest of the classes after the Vampires and Humans.  Teen angst ran sort of thick in this book, but so did the outwardly quirky thoughts and quick witted, funny comments.  Something else about Danny that truly stood out to me was the fact that beyond his being part-wulf he was normal.  He wasn't the completely hot brooding guy against the cafeteria wall and he wasn't the nerd tripping over his shoes.  He was just normal.  A normal personality with normal problems beyond being half-wulf.

Something I tend to notice in novels is when there are underlying morals.  Sometimes people over look these because they are so slight and hidden within the story but Red Moon Rising laid a great foundation for pushing some of these morals forward between the prejudice and the division of society.  Acceptance and tolerance are what I saw slightly encouraged and pushed which was a great way to add an added depth to the story.

Overall, I think Red Moon Rising is a great YA read, especially for those male YA book lovers who don't have much of a chance to read books from a guys point of view and for those who enjoy getting inside a guys head.  This book really was all about Danny and it worked.