Jessica
There were some (scant) moments when I almost liked this book, but overall, it is so slow and one of the POV characters in particular (María/Sabine) is so unlikeable, holy shit. Alice was much more likeable, but even her chapters were filled with boring flashbacks to seemingly every single thing that ever happened in her childhood in Scotland. Personally I felt like the second half of the book was better, because María/Sabine's chapters got replaced with Lottie's, and Lottie was a more sympathetic character on the whole (although she definitely lost me when she decided to kill her lover, Penny, after María/Sabine turned Penny into a vampire. It's one thing to be like, "I don't want to turn my lovers into vampires like me because while it might be an immortal life, it's a cursed life" and another thing to be like, "however if one of them does become a vampire I will instantly murder her even though I just spent twenty chapters ramming home how much I really really hate killing innocents"). I mean okay, an extremely unsubtle point in this book, which I believe multiple characters explicitly repeat, is that vampirism is not eternal life; instead you rot from the inside out, steadily losing your humanity, until you are such a hollow, devouring shell that you get stupid and careless and something kills you. So maybe that explains Lottie… María/Sabine was always fucking terrible, though. It was not clear to me why María couldn't refrain from killing the original Sabine when that Sabine was in the process of making her a vampire, when no one else in this entire book seemed to have that issue. I guess the intended answer is really just "María sucks" but in the moment it seemed to be more of a "loss of self-control in such a primal moment as the moment of death" thing, which seemed like it could happen to anyone. As a result of this happening fairly early in the book, I expected vampires to be more aware that siring further vampires was a risky endeavour, and it was bewildering to me that they were not.
Anyway, what more can I say? It's one of those books where most of the story is backstory so I can't really criticise it for that, but a lot of it was overly belaboured and extremely low-tension. Some of the present-day chapters were like this too – there was one towards the end which was like three pages of "Alice went outside and took some deep breaths" and SERIOUSLY this book needed an editor to NIX THAT. There's also a lot of unsubtle repetition of this story's vampire lore. It just felt like it took so long to get anywhere. The ending was actually okay though – Lottie tricked Alice into killing Sabine (with a very obvious lie…). Alice did that, and then also killed Lottie, knowing that Lottie was going to kill her just like she did Penny (and, again, despite this story's love of overexplaining a multitude of points I really do not feel like it explained Lottie's 180 on killing innocent people). Then Alice got a phone call from her dad and the conclusion seemed to be that, while María and Lottie completely vanished from their old lives when they became vampires, Alice didn't have to and wasn't going to. Obviously that's no long-term strategy but I guess it might work for a while (until people start to question why she still looks eighteen when she's definitely much older than eighteen), and a while is a good start. I guess she might run into problems if "trying to lead a normal life" requires her to do anything during daylight hours, too. Anyway, whatever, I'm glad I'm no longer stuck on this book!
There were some (scant) moments when I almost liked this book, but overall, it is so slow and one of the POV characters in particular (María/Sabine) is so unlikeable, holy shit. Alice was much more likeable, but even her chapters were filled with boring flashbacks to seemingly every single thing that ever happened in her childhood in Scotland. Personally I felt like the second half of the book was better, because María/Sabine's chapters got replaced with Lottie's, and Lottie was a more sympathetic character on the whole (although she definitely lost me when she decided to kill her lover, Penny, after María/Sabine turned Penny into a vampire. It's one thing to be like, "I don't want to turn my lovers into vampires like me because while it might be an immortal life, it's a cursed life" and another thing to be like, "however if one of them does become a vampire I will instantly murder her even though I just spent twenty chapters ramming home how much I really really hate killing innocents"). I mean okay, an extremely unsubtle point in this book, which I believe multiple characters explicitly repeat, is that vampirism is not eternal life; instead you rot from the inside out, steadily losing your humanity, until you are such a hollow, devouring shell that you get stupid and careless and something kills you. So maybe that explains Lottie… María/Sabine was always fucking terrible, though. It was not clear to me why María couldn't refrain from killing the original Sabine when that Sabine was in the process of making her a vampire, when no one else in this entire book seemed to have that issue. I guess the intended answer is really just "María sucks" but in the moment it seemed to be more of a "loss of self-control in such a primal moment as the moment of death" thing, which seemed like it could happen to anyone. As a result of this happening fairly early in the book, I expected vampires to be more aware that siring further vampires was a risky endeavour, and it was bewildering to me that they were not.
Anyway, what more can I say? It's one of those books where most of the story is backstory so I can't really criticise it for that, but a lot of it was overly belaboured and extremely low-tension. Some of the present-day chapters were like this too – there was one towards the end which was like three pages of "Alice went outside and took some deep breaths" and SERIOUSLY this book needed an editor to NIX THAT. There's also a lot of unsubtle repetition of this story's vampire lore. It just felt like it took so long to get anywhere. The ending was actually okay though – Lottie tricked Alice into killing Sabine (with a very obvious lie…). Alice did that, and then also killed Lottie, knowing that Lottie was going to kill her just like she did Penny (and, again, despite this story's love of overexplaining a multitude of points I really do not feel like it explained Lottie's 180 on killing innocent people). Then Alice got a phone call from her dad and the conclusion seemed to be that, while María and Lottie completely vanished from their old lives when they became vampires, Alice didn't have to and wasn't going to. Obviously that's no long-term strategy but I guess it might work for a while (until people start to question why she still looks eighteen when she's definitely much older than eighteen), and a while is a good start. I guess she might run into problems if "trying to lead a normal life" requires her to do anything during daylight hours, too. Anyway, whatever, I'm glad I'm no longer stuck on this book!