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cmitch819 's review for:
Lucy Undying
by Kiersten White
medium-paced
And with that, my summer of vampire media draws to a close! Not because it's close to the end of the summer, but because after reading this book I am at my fucking limit!
It's irritating, especially after having read Dracula, because this book really could have been excellent. I think Lucy being queer makes sense thematically since she already commits metaphorical sexual transgressions, and along these lines it makes perfect sense for her to be in unrequited love with Mina. And for all this book's many, MANY, faults, there were some really excellent ideas on this side of things. I loved the reframing ofLucy being Dracula's chosen victim as something she chose to do to protect Mina--it's an easy change that gives the character agency while remaining relatively true to her characterization in the novel, while also developing a new idea that this book wants to explore (Lucy being queer). This specific moment was actually one of the reasons I didn't just give this book one star, it just really hit for me. I also did like the inheritance scam thing , at least in a vacuum--it does explain away plot contrivances on Bram Stoker's part, and I appreciate someone being insane enough to notice these things and turn them into a full story.
All of this said, I'm not actually a stickler for adaptations remaining faithful to the source material. It's fine to change things if you think they make more sense that way (hence why I'm fine with theinheritance scam despite it inherently implicating certain characters--specifically Mina , don't really care about the rest of them--as villains when they weren't that way in the original novel). But I do believe there has to be a good reason to make changes, because there is ostensibly a reason you're adapting this source material in the first place. These characters are nothing like they are in Dracula, particularly Mina and Lucy, and I think especially in Lucy's case, this is to the detriment of the story. I truly don't believe we needed to change Lucy's personality at all in order for this story to work. She could have been the same way she was in the novel, happy and sweet and so on, and just also been in love with Mina without having the vocabulary to express that. She could have married Arthur Holmwood because Mina had mentioned him to her, and because he was supposed to be rich. I suppose she still could have kept a second journal where she wrote her thoughts about Mina, but I would have been fine if the author had simply paraphrased and changed her original journals from Dracula so we still got the gist of them. Changing her personality essentially completely only made this story feel completely disconnected from its source material, assuming the reader is familiar with it.
I know this isn't the case for everyone, and I don't think everyone should read Dracula, but there are other reasons this change is bad and it's that it contributes to what is absolutely, definitively, the worst case of telling and not showing I have ever seen in my life. It's absolutely fucking insane. Worse than An Education in Malice, which is saying something because that shit was also crazy. I cannot believe they let her publish a book in which a SIGNIFICANT portion involves one of the POV characters reading something that we, the audience, have already read, and narrating exactly what she thinks and feels about it (and thus, what we, the audience, should think and feel about it). You may know what I mean when I refer to "millennial narrator syndrome"--Iris is the worst case of this I have literally ever seen. There is absolutely no room for interpretation, because every fucking theme is spelled out to you as if you are a child, or perhaps more accurately as if you were a grown adult who likes to infantilize themself on the internet. She literally went out of her way to only write POVs that would result in telling rather than showing (a therapy session transcript, a journal, and...Iris' whole thing but especially the fact that she reads both of these previously mentioned things. Even Dracula's POV being in second person felt like this). I logged this in my reading journal as an example: on page 28, Lucy talks about her vampire transformation and the moment that Van Helsing and co. first see her in her tomb, where she like says she's going to embrace all of them or something (it's in Dracula if you've read it) and that's when they realize she's actually a vampire and recoil in horror or whatever. The exact quote is:
"For so long I thought it was because I was a vampire. But I've been with enough people to know I'm not horrifying. Quite the opposite. My teeth weren't even out. No, what disgusted them was that they had no power over me. I no longer fit their ideal of a virgin waiting for them to claim me. That was what repulsed them. That was what they found monstrous."
Like. We are just explicitly stating a thematic analysis of the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. We are in English class, except a shitty English class where the teacher just spells out exactly what you're supposed to take away from a scene. Does everyone not already fucking know this? I know not everyone has read Dracula but like even this as a theme is so overdone at this point. Oh wow vampirism and monstrousness can be a metaphor for ~desire~ huge if true certainly no one has EVER noticed this before and therefore we need it to be spoon fed to us.
(Kind of a tangent here, but I do actually wonder if part of this is that Kiersten White is a primarily YA author writing an adult novel, because this also happened with A Dark and Drowning Tide where things felt too obvious and unsubtle. I wonder if it's hard to pivot to a new audience? But even then I feel like teenagers must be smarter than we give them credit for. Sucks because Now I Rise was legitimately one of my favourite books as a teenager and until recently I'd have sworn it held up as an adult but maybe I need to reread it again to check...)
And it sucks, because there's potential here! It would have been so cool if instead of hitting us over the head with "Iris and Lucy are The Same because Controlling Mother" we could have had that realization on our own and understood, I don't know, cycles of abuse and people pleasing behaviour or whatever the point was, but like, by the end I did not fucking care, it was just so boring. Maybe this book could have worked if we'd focused just on Iris or just on Lucy, rather than trying to unite these stories, because I do think both storylines have really interesting concepts on their own--they just feel disjointed when presented together.
There's just so much wrong with this book. I could go into more detail on the sheer ridiculousness of it--Lucy singlehandedly ending World War 1 (hello????), the misspelling of Godalming seemingly just because we wanted to have the world "Gold" in it instead, the incredibly jarring (and quite frankly annoying) literary references in a world where we know the novel Dracula doesn't exist but Stoker's contemporaries still do--but I just wouldn't even know where to start or end. The pacing of basically one short scene per chapter balanced between three POVs and narration styles for the first half of the book made me feel like I never got into the story, and then the second half was just a slog. God, this book sucked, and the second half didn't even suck in an entertaining way. 1.25 stars for some interesting ideas and for being able to entertain me for the first 200ish pages well enough that I didn't immediately start skimming. I will probably return to this review later and clean it up a bit but it's past midnight and I'm tired so I'm going to fucking bed now.
It's irritating, especially after having read Dracula, because this book really could have been excellent. I think Lucy being queer makes sense thematically since she already commits metaphorical sexual transgressions, and along these lines it makes perfect sense for her to be in unrequited love with Mina. And for all this book's many, MANY, faults, there were some really excellent ideas on this side of things. I loved the reframing of
All of this said, I'm not actually a stickler for adaptations remaining faithful to the source material. It's fine to change things if you think they make more sense that way (hence why I'm fine with the
I know this isn't the case for everyone, and I don't think everyone should read Dracula, but there are other reasons this change is bad and it's that it contributes to what is absolutely, definitively, the worst case of telling and not showing I have ever seen in my life. It's absolutely fucking insane. Worse than An Education in Malice, which is saying something because that shit was also crazy. I cannot believe they let her publish a book in which a SIGNIFICANT portion involves one of the POV characters reading something that we, the audience, have already read, and narrating exactly what she thinks and feels about it (and thus, what we, the audience, should think and feel about it). You may know what I mean when I refer to "millennial narrator syndrome"--Iris is the worst case of this I have literally ever seen. There is absolutely no room for interpretation, because every fucking theme is spelled out to you as if you are a child, or perhaps more accurately as if you were a grown adult who likes to infantilize themself on the internet. She literally went out of her way to only write POVs that would result in telling rather than showing (a therapy session transcript, a journal, and...Iris' whole thing but especially the fact that she reads both of these previously mentioned things. Even Dracula's POV being in second person felt like this). I logged this in my reading journal as an example: on page 28, Lucy talks about her vampire transformation and the moment that Van Helsing and co. first see her in her tomb, where she like says she's going to embrace all of them or something (it's in Dracula if you've read it) and that's when they realize she's actually a vampire and recoil in horror or whatever. The exact quote is:
"For so long I thought it was because I was a vampire. But I've been with enough people to know I'm not horrifying. Quite the opposite. My teeth weren't even out. No, what disgusted them was that they had no power over me. I no longer fit their ideal of a virgin waiting for them to claim me. That was what repulsed them. That was what they found monstrous."
Like. We are just explicitly stating a thematic analysis of the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. We are in English class, except a shitty English class where the teacher just spells out exactly what you're supposed to take away from a scene. Does everyone not already fucking know this? I know not everyone has read Dracula but like even this as a theme is so overdone at this point. Oh wow vampirism and monstrousness can be a metaphor for ~desire~ huge if true certainly no one has EVER noticed this before and therefore we need it to be spoon fed to us.
(Kind of a tangent here, but I do actually wonder if part of this is that Kiersten White is a primarily YA author writing an adult novel, because this also happened with A Dark and Drowning Tide where things felt too obvious and unsubtle. I wonder if it's hard to pivot to a new audience? But even then I feel like teenagers must be smarter than we give them credit for. Sucks because Now I Rise was legitimately one of my favourite books as a teenager and until recently I'd have sworn it held up as an adult but maybe I need to reread it again to check...)
And it sucks, because there's potential here! It would have been so cool if instead of hitting us over the head with "Iris and Lucy are The Same because Controlling Mother" we could have had that realization on our own and understood, I don't know, cycles of abuse and people pleasing behaviour or whatever the point was, but like, by the end I did not fucking care, it was just so boring. Maybe this book could have worked if we'd focused just on Iris or just on Lucy, rather than trying to unite these stories, because I do think both storylines have really interesting concepts on their own--they just feel disjointed when presented together.
There's just so much wrong with this book. I could go into more detail on the sheer ridiculousness of it--Lucy singlehandedly ending World War 1 (hello????), the misspelling of Godalming seemingly just because we wanted to have the world "Gold" in it instead, the incredibly jarring (and quite frankly annoying) literary references in a world where we know the novel Dracula doesn't exist but Stoker's contemporaries still do--but I just wouldn't even know where to start or end. The pacing of basically one short scene per chapter balanced between three POVs and narration styles for the first half of the book made me feel like I never got into the story, and then the second half was just a slog. God, this book sucked, and the second half didn't even suck in an entertaining way. 1.25 stars for some interesting ideas and for being able to entertain me for the first 200ish pages well enough that I didn't immediately start skimming. I will probably return to this review later and clean it up a bit but it's past midnight and I'm tired so I'm going to fucking bed now.