A review by vreyna20_2004
An Education in Malice by S.T. Gibson

dark emotional hopeful mysterious tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? N/A
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

3.0

First and foremost, thank you Netgalley and Redhook Books for giving me an eARC in exchange for my honest review. Now onto the review.

I had high hopes for this book and they sadly didn’t achieve it. I’ve heard plenty of great things about how beautiful S. T Gibson’s prose is and I expected nothing less but while reading it I thought I would come out a different person like when you would read a book in English class and feel a new person with this new revelation but I felt none of that. It was a simple story that went too long in my opinion.
I wished Laura hadn’t kept her mouth shut and just told De Lafontaine to kill Isis or De Lafontaine to not drag out the situation so much. I get it she was in love and didn’t want to kill either Isis or Carmilla but when she killed Isis she even said that she knew how it would end between them so there’s no real reason for her to delay the inevitable. Also despite so much going on in this story, it felt as if nothing happened there was no progress made in the story it felt like the last 10% maybe even 20% of the book was when the book started to make progress at what they would do with Isis.

Now the romance between Laura and Carmilla. It didn’t evoke any emotion within me or make me scream at Laura/Carmilla to confess their love for each other it felt rushed almost instalove because Carmilla hated Laura for her writing and how much De Lafontaine liked her and talked about her but when Carmilla got turned to a vampire (because of De Lafontaine wanting to wake her lover) and Carmilla being hungry had to drink Laura’s blood that’s when her distasteful actions towards Laura switched and now she wanted to be near her all the time like a crying puppy. As you can tell, I didn’t enjoy the characters as much as I would like to me they did things for no reason their actions made no sense and once they explained why they did what they did it was a dumb reason.


The only thing about this story that I enjoyed was that Laura was a plus-size girl since there are not a lot of stories about that but even then I would forget she was plus-size.

If someone asked my thoughts on this book I would say, “It had the potential to be great but fell short.” What I’m trying to say is some may enjoy it some may not and I’m sadly not those people.
Expand filter menu Content Warnings