I liked it! I find the mayfair history really interesting and I love how she chronicled their history via secondhand accounts, although it did get a little repetitive.

I’m really intrigued by rowan and lasher, but I couldn’t give a flying fuck about michael. his backstory was completely unnecessary. he’s joining the marius, david, and (book) louis club with how boring I find them.

I love how she writes about new orleans - it always feels like I’m there even though I’ve never been. you can feel the love for her city in every page she writes.

major critique of this book is her incessant weirdness about irish & mixed race people. rice has a habit of making all her characters have the same viewpoints on race, gender roles, pedophilia etc. regardless of their culture or century, which just makes it seem that these are her viewpoints that she refuses to examine, alter, or personalize for the otherwise brilliant characters she writes. it flattens them, on top of being questionable. similarly, she constantly asserts that rough sex = rape and it’s making me question whether or not some of her characters were truly sexually assaulted in the vampire chronicles, because it’s a little fuzzy and I feel that that wasn’t intentional. I don’t understand why some people think of rape in this way, it baffles me.

would I reread it? probably not. my opinion towards this book is similar to the IWTV (book): I have a delicate mix of intrigue and indifference towards them both. i definitely enjoyed both more than TOtBT and MtD, but they won’t be the books I’ll return to in the future. the books I’ll be rereading are TVL, QOtD, and TVA. I’m interested in reading the rest of the mayfair witches, and I can’t wait to get back to the vampire chronicles with merrick! I miss my vampires.

also. the greatest sentence in all literature is this: and I don’t fear your ghost even if he sports the cock of an archangel!!! thank you, anne rice.

***there isn’t a specific tag for this but there is explicit pregnancy/birth horror present in the latter half of this book!