Lucy Undying by Kiersten White

TL;DR: A book for people who hate Dracula and love cringey instalove
Source: NetGalley! Thank you for the eArc!

Plot: A mess. Basically feels like the author writing some self-insert fanfiction in which she tells Lucy everyone was out to get her and they get to kill Dracula and have sex.
Characters: No thank you.
Setting: This is all over the place, they travel quite a bit and there is a maybe haunted house but none of it felt well realized.
Horror/Vampires: When the cringe is this strong there is nothing else to be appreciated. I suppose if cringe is a horror subgenre for you, maybe?

Thoughts:

The way I want to describe everything about this I disliked would make me sound unhinged, truly. This one is billed as ‘A Dracula Novel’ on the bottom of the cover and I beg to differ. I think the best way to describe this would be a ‘Lucy Westenra Self Insert FanFiction’. We get Lucy’s story before and during Dracula, and current day with a young woman who finds her diaries and ends up friends with her.

I’m going to drop spoilers here – if you don’t want them here is my short version. Don’t read this if you like Dracula in any way. I recommend you just reread the original novel or just read anything else.

Now, the short version of this. Kiersten White, in the acknowledgements, of this book states they full believe that the original Dracula novel had an unspoken plot to steal Lucy’s money and fortune (which I find ridiculous). This is the story of Iris (our modern day main character) discovering this and falling in love with Lucy who has been a vampire this whole time. In addition to this we have Lucy moving through history meeting all these women who she either sleeps with or saves (much like a man in many old style fantasy or horror books, these women also have about the same depth as those old style books). In addition to this she single handedly ends World War 1 by stomping her foot at a bunch of old men. We get copious amounts of modern day band references, so many Emily Dickinson quotes, and the worst pet names I’ve ever read (my little cabbage and my little butter chicken).

Any feminism or empowerment we could have gotten for any of these characters is completely lost in how surface level all of this is. It reads like a poorly done fanfiction. Every scene, except the big monologues that you can tell the author had written up and stored for years, is brief and has about the depth of ‘Oh I stomped my foot at these old men and told them to sign a paper and left’.

I don’t claim to be a great writer or highly intelligent but this… was a mess. Just skip it. In fact if you see it in the store, look left, turn left – go elsewhere.

1 Star. I can’t even make a fun rating on this one. No.