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3.55 AVERAGE
3.55 AVERAGE
“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.
Complex with two women’s stories woven together from two centuries, almost like two separate books in one. Part of me loved the book, part of me was left confused and eh. I wonder how much was lost in translation. It was romantic, yet angering somehow?
Having lost my mother to cancer, I found the second half where her mother slowly dies.. emotional. A way of processing my own grief while also being triggered by the slow burn end I try to forget.
Did not like the ending. Like I what??
This low-key reads like the sapphic version of Interview with a Vampire.
I took a star off my rating because I didn't enjoy the shift in perspectives and format. Some of the parts from the other woman's POV felt mundane and I felt like there wasn't much plot or character development but rather pages of info dump. But the highlight of this novel is the author's atmospheric and engrossing prose.
This one is annoying bc it was billed as a decadent sapphic Latin American gothic vampire novel (juicy) with lots of atmosphere and intrigue. The plot was simple and that was fine, but the writing didn’t feel mature on a sentence level. Idk if it’s a translation thing, but there wasn’t anything exciting about how Yuszczuk constructed her writing. If I went in expecting a YA novel-esque narrative and flow where the main character shows us the origins of vampire tropes (like crushed red velvet curtains, why they sleep in coffins, etc), I would have been less frustrated. I def said to my partner “ugh, I can’t believe I still have 20% of this book left !!” Found the will to finish with sheer force of spite, which I imagine will describe most of my 2025.
