Whenever I read a disappointing book, I sometimes wonder, "How did this get published? Who picked this up?" In this case, the answer is obvious, since the author in question is an experienced literary agent.

The thing is, though, I can almost make out Caldwell's vision for this book. A deeply entrenched fantasy world with gods, vampires, seers, and humans all duking it out. All the while, it's quite queernormative (For sapphics, anyway. There weren't any major achillean nor trans/nb characters. But most of the prominent women were hella gay). I have no doubt that this world Caldwell created has been something she's fully sunk herself into for the longest time; I'm the same way with my own writing. We get so insane with the fictional people inside our heads, but it really takes a specific skill to get it on paper and have its intended readers become insane about it, too. Unfortunately, in my opinion, Caldwell didn't achieve that in tis book.

The first thing you're greeted with when you open the book is a giant family tree of gods and small paragraphs about the subclasses of vampire. Then you're further bombarded with info-dump after info-dump, all of it worldbuilding. As someone who just read the whole book, I barely retained any of it, and I'm certain all of it will have left my brain by the time I wake up tomorrow. It was so boring and tiresome that I contemplated dropping the whole thing, but my stubbornness won out.

The characters aren't much better. Favre had the potential to be interesting, but, in the end, she's nothing but the big baddie who monologues her evil plan and constantly repeats her intentions/motives in her inner dialogue (She also has diary entries?? They read the exact same when it was just prose. I don't understand why Caldwell did this other than to imply historians/archivists have collections of these documents?? It's all so confusing, and thinking about it too much is not worth the effort right now). I found Najja to be very irritating, and Leyla felt so forgettable and bland. Hell, Leyla didn't appear til chapter 5, and it took half of the book to get to inciting incident only for our main characters to dawdle around with each other (It's not a slow burn. They kiss at the ~250 page mark, and they have their third act breakup 15 pages later over something very stupid). We're constantly being told how sad these girls are and all the pain they went through, but I could not muster a single ounce of caring for any of it.

I dunno. Vampires have been making a comeback, which I don't mind, but this just was not it. I'd rather read the other sapphic Black vampire book that came out this year again rather than finish this duology. I just wish I was able to enjoy this more than I did.

I would like to thank the publisher and NetGalley for allowing me to read and honestly review an advanced reader’s copy of this book.

Vampire novels are having a renaissance and I’m so here for it. The weather’s been perfect for it too, so I was really excited to dig into this one.

I really wish it had worked for me. The vampire concept is really cool; former gods turning bloodthirsty; the world building has the bones of something strong, but all of that is letdown by characters.

They just fall a little flat for me. There’s far too many skips in the narration for me to feel like I’m really getting to know any of them.
I feel like the feelings between the two love interests moved far too fast for what is meant to be a “slow burn”. We’re told they travel for a while, and clearly grow closer, but because we don’t get to see any of that, it feels a little shallow to me. I don’t feel their feelings for each other changing, I am just told that they have. I wish we’d gotten to *see* more of that.
This slow burn lacks yearning and tension. The plot is good, it moves too fast, but overall it was a solid story!