A review by blossomingwish
Lucy Undying by Kiersten White

1.0

Thank you Netgalley for this arc. 

Full disclosure I did dnf at 17% so I don’t know if the rest of the book improved but I just couldn’t make it through.

I’m extremely disappointed with this book. It’s the first book I picked up after reading Dracula and I was so excited to read a retelling that centered Lucy since she’s absolutely amazing! Unfortunately this book did NOT do the novel Dracula justice at all. First of all, the characterization of all of the characters (including and especially Lucy) is so entirely inaccurate. I genuinely think that anyone who loved Dracula would absolutely hate this book. One of the first diary entries we get from Lucy describes her hatred for the characters who she did care about in the original novel. The romance between Lucy and Mina was also so poorly done in my opinion. The original book was a better love story than this bullshit. I did find the transcripts between Lucy and whoever she’s talking to extremely interesting. The descriptions of what it was like for her to become a vampire and befriend the wives of Dracula was super interesting. Unfortunately once she went on her trip to China (so random??) it kind of fell off and was no longer interesting to me. 

Lastly I’d like to cover the Iris chapters. I get it, this is a gothic book full of mystery and intrigue but in order to have that you need to actually make your audience care about what the mystery is. Unfortunately for me I did not care at all over this weird thing going on with Iris’s mother. I found all of her chapters (except the one where she’s exploring the house) to be extremely dull with bad dialogue and cringy pop culture references. Also the line where she’s talking about the understanding between queer people is just weird. Also calling that girl from the train station her angel was honestly the last straw in making me dnf this. And the “my little cabbage” nickname?? Weird and unnecessary. Anyways!! If you are curious about this book please read it anyways and I sincerely hope you enjoy it more than I did.