Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.55 AVERAGE
3.55 AVERAGE
"Apparently, and this was still hard for me to accept, there were certain things she preferred to do alone, as if we were strangers. And I was left with the mystery-immense, present, intact of why my mother, who had always involved me so much in her life sometimes more than I could stand, sometimes more than it was fair for her to do had decided to face her death entirely alone, never saying a word; even pretending it was something she didn't consider or know anything about, until her suicide attempt proved the contrary beyond a shadow of a doubt."
"Right then I understood, for the first time, that our family's history was slipping into oblivion; when my mother died, a huge chunk was going to break off like glacial ice and there was nothing I could do about it."
“I heard your heartbeat before I could see you. And when I finally stepped out of my coffin, your scent still lingered in the air. You had been so close . . . I’d felt as if I could have leapt out and devoured you, but I was locked inside. When you left, I begged for you to come back and free me. It wasn’t the first time in a century that I had woken up, but it was the first time I had wished to come out of hiding.”
She had me in the first half, she really did.
There will always be a special place in my heart for vampire novels (ask any woman who was a teenager between 1990 and 2015, it's a rite of passage), so I was really excited to stumble across this novel on BookTok. Sapphic vampires? In a non-European setting?? Sign me up!
The first half(ish) of the novel is narrated from the perspective of an unnamed female vampire, and reading this was enthralling. Mariana Yuszczuk's beautiful prose creates a chilling creature of the night with all the hallmarks of the traditional Stoker archetypes that we all know and love. She's dangerous, she's intelligent, she's tortured, and she's isolated (not for lack of trying). Many times during the story, the vampire seeks company in a way that seems Sisyphean, and is definitely reminiscent of Anne Rice's Louis de Pointe du Lac. As she navigates her dark, lonely existence, she contemplates life, connection, time, and her own existence. Finally, she chooses to fade from the tenuous human society.
This brings us to the second half, and our human female protagonist. She's got a lot on her plate, between a child to raise and a terminal, ailing mother. For whatever reason, I had a harder time connecting to this character than I did the monster in the first portion of the book. As she winds her way through a mini-mystery and eventually meets the vampire, the character only seems to become more isolated, not appearing to like any company she finds herself in. That is, of course, until the vampire.
All in all, I really enjoyed this. The prose is striking, sharp, and beautiful, and it's definitely a vampire novel that doesn't follow all of the vampire novel tropes in a way that's both familiar and refreshing. If I'd had a little more to connect to the human character with, I think I would have been able to give this books five stars, but something about it just left me a little...thirsty for more.
I'll see myself out now.