A book about love, passion, desire, queerness and gender, Mrs. S explores the different aspect of queer identity while involving you in a burning love story.

The longing between the narrator and Mrs. S is very subtle and that characteristic shows the forbidden nature of it. We slowly get to know the narrator’s feelings with the way she interacts with Mrs. S, getting to know her inner thoughts and not only how she views Mrs. S, but how she views the way Mrs. S looks at her. There’s so much yearning between them, soft moments with a much bigger meaning, glances and touches that burn with desire, a sexual attraction that grows with intensity the more the two characters interact.

A surprising part of this book, and probably my favorite, was how well it approached gender and (not) feeling at home in your body. Looking at someone and wishing to be like them, to feel as comfortable as they seem to be, all that while still wanting to be noticed. To want to change how you look while still wanting someone to look at you.

I’m still not sure how to feel about the prose in this book. It takes some getting used to, but it does gets to a point where it becomes easier to understand who’s talking and how the narrator differentiates between dialogue and her own thoughts. The 1st person pov together with the almost dreamlike dialogue, the absence of quotation marks and dialogue tags makes the connection with the narrator much more personal, almost like we’re stepping into the main characters’ shoes and experiencing their story.

But the most important message of this book: don’t let your husband stop you from finding the butch of your life.

If you enjoyed Carmilla but wanted it to be gayer, this is the book for you.

The plot follows the same setting as Carmilla, with Carmilla and Laura’s background and the way they meet, but it’s when they are together that the story starts to diverge and becomes its own. It still has that same gothic and creepy atmosphere, and that mystery that something is going on in that town but no one is sure of what, while trying to connect it with the characters.

The writing is reminiscent of the original, making sense with the time the story is set in and the way the characters talk/interact with each other, but a little lighter than the original, also making it an easier and addictive read.

The true star of this book is the romance between Carmilla and Laura and I loved how well written this was. There’s so many moments between them revolving around the romantic and sexual nature of their relationship, their flirting, their yearning, such a tender love that you have no clue where it might lead, but you can’t help but root for them, wanting to see them love each other as passionately as they do.

While I feel like Carmilla focused a lot more on the vampire lore and the story around the characters, Carmilla and Laura takes those same characters and explores them even further, making them more complex and giving us a bigger insight into their personalities, story and desires.

Besides the forbidden nature of their relationship involving a vampire, the “sin” of both being women and Laura being reticent about it was so well explored. The belief that two women being lovers holds the same horror as being caught protecting a monster, how Laura goes through those feelings and her internal fight between having to do what people expect from her and what she actually wants for herself and Carmilla.