I cannot understate how much I disliked this book. I tried so very hard to get past my initial reservations with the overall style, but unfortunately, I wasn’t able to. I first saw the cover art for this book back in late 2021, so it’s been on my radar for a very long time and I was excited to read and love this, but I just couldn’t.

The most egregious thing was this author’s writing style - I wasn’t meshing with it at all. I saw another review say that it sounded like “elder millennial speak,” and now I can’t stop thinking about that. The tone is extremely conversational, which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, but it’s presented callously and without any finesse. A lot of sentences start with “FYI”, “Obvi,” or “Let me break this down for you,” instead of actually sharing. There is a scene where the main character, Lily, is in a meeting and instead of writing out the meeting, the author just starts a new chapter and says, “Okay, so I’m not going to make you sit through the rest of our meeting. All you really need to know is…” and fills in the blanks. This goes straight back to “showing” and not “telling” the readers what you’re thinking. Something will also happen to Lily in one chapter and then she’ll recount it to her best friend or to the love interest, Tristan, in the next - we just read that, we don’t need to see it again.

Lily’s whole schtick is that she’s fat and doesn’t love her body - which normally, I love to see in romances, especially, because it provides excellent room for character development. The problem is, the fat rep and body positivity is not done well at all and feels more harmful than good. Lily hates herself and that, in turn, makes her bitter and angry to all other women, even her best friend. There’s a moment where Lily’s friend Cat mentions how Lily makes her feel shitty about being thin and that she has problems too (after the author spends multiple paragraphs talking about how Cat is perfect and has no problems), but the whole scene reeks of “but not ALL thin people are happy…” I found the ways that Lily and her mother talked about her body to be extremely harmful, and I found the dieting representation to also be toxic. Tristan is shown to “love” Lily’s body, but all of their attraction is superficial and you can’t believe any of their connection to be real.

This is more minor, but I also really disliked the vampire lore in this book. It’s just your standard Nosferatu rules: no sunlight, no reflection, stake through the heart, etc. There are a lot of vampire stories out there - if you want yours to be impactful, you’ve got to actually do something with it instead of say the same things over and over. With fantastical settings, you’re given the perfect opportunity to build memory points and this does none of that. Instead, it relies on best friend Cat to recap all of Twilight NUMEROUS TIMES to Lily…because that’s helpful. The only “unique” thing is that you can request consent to bite a human using the vampire thrall, but that never worked on Lily - so she was non-consensually turned into a vampire. It just feels gross.

At the end of the day, I just couldn’t bring myself to care about this story any longer. I could have probably pushed through and finished it, but why would I finish something that I’m ACTIVELY disliking. I’m so disappointed that this one didn’t end up working for me, but I can’t recommend this, nor do I think I’ll pick up another book by this author again.