Reviews with content warning for Alcohol - Das Reich der Vampire

Reviews tagging 'Alcohol'

Das Reich der Vampire by Jay Kristoff

50 reviews

swally2005's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Excellent. This book does take some time to get pulled into, but if you stick with it, it is definitely worth it. The tale starts off with Gabriel de Leon, an infamous vampire hunter, who happens to be half vampire himself, captured in a prison cell and being implored to tell his life's story to a vampire historian named Jean-Francois of the Chastain vampire bloodline. This book is one night of Gabriel sitting in a cell and recounting his life, while the vampire historian records it.

Gabriel's story jumps back-and-forth between different time periods in his life, as well as back to his present reality; so at first, this can be quite overwhelming as you still don't really understand what's going on, but you get used to it and things start making sense as the story goes on. The world-building in this book is excellent, and the storytelling format is quite engrossing once you get past the initial confusion. This book also uses many French words, and some of them may be hard to figure out the meaning of, based on context alone, so be prepared to have to look up a few. This can be more than a little challenging to do if you are listening to this via audiobook (which I was), as you kind of have to guess on spelling.

Speaking of the audiobook, I'm not sure if this was just on my version, or if this issue was present across all audiobook platforms, but I borrowed this from my library through Libby, and there were several instances in this book where the audio would cut off part of the sentence. It became annoying after about the 10th time it happened, so I tracked down the e-book in Kindle Unlimited just to see how much I was missing, and was able to verify that it was usually just the first word or two of the sentence, so it's nothing major, but it was annoying nonetheless, and was an issue that was prevalent all throughout the recording.

Minor audio issue aside, I am very much looking forward to continuing on with Gabriel's tale in the next book, as he does not finish telling it yet.

Content Warnings

chaptermaggot's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional funny mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

Content Warnings

elskede's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Content Warnings

chazleyk's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

amy14's review against another edition

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challenging dark sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

booksalacarte's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

Empire of the vampire- 4.75⭐️ 3🌶️

Epic Fantasy

Vampires

Catholic inspired religion

Storytelling style narration

Confinement

Secret society

War

🏳️‍🌈 side characters

Tw: addiction, homofobia

To break it down to the bare minimal… this was an interview with the vampire styled story with dual timelines and a flawed MC. The story was slow, as journeying can be, but entertaining the whole time.

So often male authors, choose to sanitize the softer emotions in their books, to push the physical. Moving the plot forward for the glory and the heroism of their main character. As a woman, the more sterilized approach to emotion in men’s writing, tends to turn me away…

This book is anything but emotionally sterile. I found myself enjoying the emotional and spiritual journey of the main character and the friendships and bonds created and broken.

There were so many plot twists. Character flaws were aplenty.

I must have the humor of a 14 year old boy, because some of the insults and jokes had me chuckling.

The things that I didn’t enjoy include misogyny standard to European medieval feudalism centered around religious orthodoxy. If you thought a book that was inspired by medieval Catholic Europe was going to be without it being present, I don’t know what to tell you. But it’s there, it’s never fun to have to read in excess. But it’s an adult fantasy, with cursing and I get it.

Bad guys as pedophiles. Yup. Tracks. But the other underage sexualization was not great. A lot of times this is used as a chance to show how disgusting the enemy is. And it’s just gross all around… even when the MC is underage.

I am so looking forward to reading the next book in the series.

Content Warnings