Theoretically this book should have been a fairly fun romance between a vampire and a newly-minted vampire slayer as they are forced to work together and realise that they may actually have feelings other than hate for one another. Unfortunately, I had several issues with this book that made this a book that didn’t really work for me.

The book opens with probably the vaguest content warnings page that I have ever seen which on one hand, I really appreciate books including content warnings but on the other, it really was insultingly vague. The basic premise of this book is that every time a vampire is turned a person who hates them becomes a vampire slayer as a kind of balance thing. This impacts our main character who is a skinny bartender-slash-actress who wakes-up one morning having gained 24 pounds and having a significantly more buff physique. This change is obviously going to come with a good helping of dysphoria but I felt as though the way this was handled was somewhat clumsy and felt as though it was equating being muscular with being fat and there was also a sprinkling of the tired idea that they only way it is acceptable to not be skinny is if someone is fit. Needless to say, I really did not like the way that this element of the story played-out. As I got towards the end of the book, it occurred to me that I am not really sure whether a physical transformation really added anything to the story in any meaningful way.

Another aspect of the story that didn’t work for me was the relationship between Cassie (the slayer) and Nick (her coworker / the vampire). I completely understood that this was intended to be a cutesy romance and that was not something that I had issue with but rather I did not enjoy the fact that it was insta-love / insta-lust. The book commits the cardinal sin of continuously telling rather than showing that Nick and Cassie have had feelings for one another since they first met but realistically what we got was in the space of a week Cassie went from hating Nick and wanting to kill him to being in love with him 🙃 This was just not enjoyable to read and spoke to a writer who hasn’t honed their craft. I also really didn’t like at one point when a character asserted that Nick had been unkind to Cassie because he secretly liked her… these are grown adults not children and can we maybe not continue to perpetuate a harmful stereotype that hating women is some way of showing affection? No thank you.

The final issue that I want to touch on was the resolution of this book. Maybe around the halfway mark of the book Cassie and the reader are told that a slayer will stop being a slayer if they fall in love with a vampire. At this point, you realise that no matter what happens Cassie ends-up in a situation where she loses. It was never going to be Nick that she lost which means that Cassie has to lose her slayer powers. The book tries to tell the reader that Cassie never really wanted to be a slayer anymore and it was all just about the lessons that she learnt from being a slayer for a week but I couldn’t help feeling a bit disheartened that the supposed happily ever after was Cassie having to sacrifice a part of herself in order to be with Nick whilst he pretty much got everything that he wanted. It just didn’t sit well with me.

I appreciate that this has been a very negative review but that is not to say that this book is an inherently bad book. I genuinely think that this is a book that another reader would really love but that is very much not the kind of reader that I am. Please don’t let my review dissuade you from picking up this book because ultimately the things that are an ick for me are just that, an ick for me, and you may end-up having the absolute best time with this book.