Hi, I have an important message for you. It's too late for Kiersten White to see this, but maybe I can help someone else.

If you have to read a classic book (like Dracula) in college, and you find yourself only liking one character and hating all the others...you don't actually need to write a retelling of that book that valorizes your fave at the expense of villainizing everyone else. And if you do end up writing a retelling, it's totally okay to keep that book in a drawer of your desk, where it cannot torment me, personally, instead of inflicting it upon the world.

This is a retelling of Dracula focusing on the character Lucy Westenra. I like Lucy. Lucy tends to be reduced to Mina's slutty BFF before getting killed off, so I when I first heard about this book and saw the cover, I was cautiously intrigued, because Lucy frequently does deserve better than adaptations give her.

Alas.

Additionally, this is a book about the heir to a Utah-based vampire MLM trying to escape and/or destroy their evil family's evil MLM empire, and those two story ideas - Dracula retelling "empowering" Lucy and vampire MLM - don't really mesh well. Maybe they could have. But here, they don't.

I have a LOT of thoughts and a lot of things to say about this book, but as I was writing them out, my stream-of-consciousness ramblings started to feel a bit unhinged (even to me), so here's a shorter review in the meantime.

If you like Dracula and its characters, I doubt you'll like this book that much. Its interpretation of pretty much every character is shallow and uninteresting, ranging from Lucy as a perfect pure sad rich girl victim to the suitors as overbearing idiot men to Mina as the cartoonishly evil architect of Lucy's downfall. At points, it genuinely just reads like Kiersten White trying to convince you, the reader, of her opinions and headcanons about Dracula characters, and why all of them are bad except Lucy. And the ways in which Lucy is interpreted and supposedly empowered also felt very shallow as far as feminism goes...So as an adaptation, it did not do a lot for me.

I was pretty here for the vampire MLM story, though! I think the idea of a vampire MLM set in Utah is genuinely SO funny. Once we got to the second half, where the MLM is a much bigger focus, I kind of wished we had scrapped the Lucy connection and just written an entire book about that idea, focusing on Iris' efforts to bring down her family. Maybe it even could have been connected to Dracula in some vague way (RIP Renfield you would have loooooved MLMs). But not...the way this book does it, because I think the way this book does it is stupid.

Also, I'm curious to know what people who haven't read Dracula would think of this book, because I actually think there's a solid chance this book would not make sense if you don't already know the plot of Dracula. And that's kind of a bad thing, in my opinion. Retellings should be able to stand on their own, and I'm just not convinced that this one does.

So yeah. At some point if I finish my longer and more rambley review, I'll link to it.

maybe it's just me who's read too many cosy books or maybe this one just wasn't good.

the author made a list of everything people like about japan and cosy books and mixed it all together. just the whole sakura concept was too much, we also have the calico cat, the coffee, the manga writer...

"for fans of before the coffee gets cold" doesn't mean people want to read the same book but worse. there are so many more of these types of books being translated because of the popularity of before the coffee gets cold and i think it's overdone and it's overshadowing japanese books that are actually good.

and once again something that never changes is how conservative and traditionalist these cosy books are. we get to meet a lot of different characters but they all seem similar to me, no diversity whatsoever. i'm sad that so many of these books are being translated when some of my favorite books aren't translated in english (for example ogawa ito's works that i read in french).

if you want to read cosy books i would recommend reading michiko aoyama's work (which i also find quite conservative at times but they still have more depth than this book) or hiro arikawa's work which i love. one of ogawa ito's (that i mentioned earlier) books is gonna be published in july (tsubaki stationary store) so be sure to check it out it's a great book!

I started reading this book on feb 3, and didn’t really know how heavy it was gonna be. The next morning, my grandfather with dementia passed away. He also had trouble remembering or recognizing me. And I continued the book, cause books are my escape. But the next part of the book is from the perspective of a man with dementia. And he too struggled to remember and recognizing his granddaughter. And it was just such weird timing for all these things to happen and it hit me really damn hard.