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tessatalksbooks 's review for:
The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires
by Grady Hendrix
dark
tense
medium-paced
I dove into this book with no prior knowledge besides reading a small summary & it being picked for my book club this month. I really wanted to love it. I found the first parts of the book intriguing and it left me wanting more every time I popped on the audiobook on my drive to work. Then we got to the portions that really should’ve come with a trigger warning. As a survivor of sexual assault, it was unnerving to hear. The scenes were deeply disturbing and the amount of detail put into the description was unnecessary, in my opinion. I also found the author’s description of the women throughout the book rather infuriating at some points, and the audio portrayal of the POC characters was also disappointing, especially for 2020. There were also lines that just completely made my blood boil such as “some poor black people lost their houses - that’s just how it is.” 😑 We’re all over the white savior trope IRL, we don’t need a whole book on it. I kept waiting for it to take a turn and get better but it never did. Overall, I really wanted to love it but it fell short of expectations in a magnitude of ways. I honestly feel like 2.25⭐️ is maybe slightly too generous.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death, Child death, Death, Pedophilia, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Violence, Blood, Murder