If you need something soft, light-hearted, and incredibly low stakes. Nothing much happens, except for the slow bloom of reciprocating feelings. It's honestly cute and I love all the gaming stuff. Incredibly funny to see modern romance playing out as courtship in PUBG.

The last 20% of my experience was soured by so much spelling errors though. It was quite frustrating especially because it's a physical book so it's like, why didn't they check all these before printing. My quality rating is really just all that. Though the perspective changes were a little confusing, it's easy to get used to them. The translations also seemed a little choppy and stilted sometimes, but I'm personally not too bothered by it. I am annoyed that they chose to translate 'RanBaobei' as 'BabeRan' instead of 'RanBaby'. It just works a whole lot better in the jokes and even the way it'd roll off the tongue.

Other than those nitpicks though, it really is a sweet little book. The boys are sweet, considerate, respectful green flags but will bite when provoked. The classy, fine arts germophobe x esports gaming pro with a bad diet trope of my dreams.

It's like I was stabbed with a knife and it twisted around in my chest in the slowest of slow motions, for the duration of the entire book.

If you can't already tell, the title is a flat out lie and should instead be This Is Not Just A Vampire Story. This book is about grief, love, and the terrifying ordeal of being immortal, with the whole vampirism being the backbone of it.

While I'm not typically a fan of non-linear timelines, I do see the value of this narrative style to show Victor's sad, tragic immortal life—how it started and how it's going, and both sides are bad. In 1949, Victor deals with the fear of time-accurate laws and news of homophobia, among other non-consensual vampiric things. In the present, Victor has to confront the reality that what little joy life had brought him, are on their last legs.

More than the romance, I was really moved by the found/chosen family aspect with Victor and the boys. The boys took the disabled, new kid under their wings and I honestly adored them for that. I wish we got more present day Victor with the old boys honestly.

For the most part I enjoyed the story and trusted it, even with all the time jumping, but there definitely were stuff at the end where I was ????? a lot of the time. There's a decision Victor makes that makes sense in the narrative but that's when things kind of sloped down for me, only because I was expecting the explanation about the vampire stuff to actually be there. But! I do recognise that This Is Not a Vampire Story so I'm not gonna dig in on that too much. I know it's not the point of the story and I can respect what it wants to do.

Overall, I'm honestly glad I picked up this book. It doesn't hide that this is an incredibly sad book and I respect it. Pre-PB me would have never picked this up though, and I'm also just glad to read it and be reminded of how much good PB has been to me in terms of my reading habits too!