BINGO: Borrow, I got this from my library as I do most all of my books!
hot take I’ll round up to three stars for this utterly infuriating book that almost makes me want to don a dress and join Phyllis Schlafly in protesting that women (vampires) they doth take too much
I feel like one of the few people who were not enamored of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, probably because I didn’t get or see the love/hate relationship between Addie and Luc (the Dark), which in my mind was just a straight up toxic relationship and deserved to be tossed entirely into the trash. So I approached this book with a bit of trepidation–so well reviewed! but then again, so was TILfAL.
In a nutshell: this book annoyed me, and I kept parsing in my head whether I’d award it two stars and what I’d write about why and how I’d justify it…BUT then again, I took it to bed and stayed up until I finished it, so I cannot fault that at the end I was engrossed by these characters.
We’ve got three main female POVs, who each turn into a vampire at distinct time periods ~300 years apart. Sabine is our main protagonist (antagonist), turned in the early 1500s by a vampire she meets when trying to escape a loveless and mildly abusive relationship to a local viscount. Charlotte (Lottie) is turned by Sabine in the 1800s, trying to escape a marriage to a man that does not appeal to her, because she is a lesbian (so is Sabine) and grew up with rather more freedom than the average wallflower of the erc. Alice is turned in 2019, during a one-night stand with an enigmatic woman, and the book is sort of framed by her experience and attempts at piecing together what’s happened.
Cast away your thoughts of moral vampires who refuse to partake in human sacrifice, but forget too the classic vampires with their hilarious accents and ‘monster’ ways. These vampires are cold blooded (heh) sociopaths, and the disconnect between their actions and justifications leaves me cold, too, as a reader. The main drive of these vampires is their insatiable hunger–they are forever thirsty for blood, unable to drink even water, and kill seemingly with impunity to attempt to slake what is an unquenchable craving. That’s fine, I suppose, to have unrepentant main characters who just kill those around them, but Schwab doesn’t want to commit to having her characters be all bad. So they, you know, pick on men who leer at them on the street. But in this case, our vampires purposefully go out to streets frequented by sex workers and strut around looking for someone to notice them and then do something lewd and then congratulate themselves on having eliminated a ‘bad’ man. That’s not how it works! That’s entrapment, and we rightfully condemn it.
And in general it’s the men who have to explain to the women that they’re being selfish. Our two examples of moral vampires who have managed to live for centuries in a semi-respectful way are both dudes, who–correctly!–call out the female vampires for being unable to contain themselves. Which muddies the messaging even more, like is it the nature of vampires to be untameable or just female vampires who can’t fight against their baser impulses? Ezra (one of these two male vampires) very rightly calls out Charlotte towards the end of the book in a moment that probably did push this over to three stars, basically saying “You’ve decided these girl’s lives are worth less than your feeling lonely.” And he’s right!