Halloween Bingo 2024
Not nearly as much fun as I anticipated. I liked it, but it could have been so much better.
Have you ever daydreamed about visiting your favourite fictional world? If I'm having trouble getting to sleep, I imagine having a conversation with one of my favourite characters. It relaxes me enough that I'm soon out like a light. Tess not only gets to dream about it, she is sent through a portal to experience it, but what was meant to be a quick message delivery turns into something rather more complicated.
Tess's beloved book is Blood Feuds which describes the lives of vampires, banished to an alternate reality overlaying mundane Manhattan. When she gets there, everything seems familiar. She recognizes the major players and the landmarks. But does she really know them? This all seemed like a good idea when Octavia, an accidental escapee from the Island, talked her into it, but now she's one lone, tasty human among a lot of bloodsuckers. Will she find safety with Callum or with Felix?
The additional wrinkle is that Tess has trauma in her past. The author flirts a long time with the details, but any woman will recognize the situation—date rape drugs. She experiences panic attacks and leaves the university where she and the man in question both study and teach. (And in real life, it doesn't usually wrap up so positively.)
So, on the surface, this a story about Tess falling in love with a vampire, but really it is a rather thinly disguised sermon on consent and the way women are treated when they report sexual assault. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I prefer messages such as this to be less blatant. Tell me without spelling it out directly. I mean, it's a good lesson, but I want a fun novel more than I want a moral to the tale. In addition, once this point is hammered home, the rest of the plot is rather tepid and paint-by-number. Disappointingly, the vampires aren't too much different from mortals.
I read this book to fulfill The Carpathians square of my Halloween Bingo card.
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