whimsydearest

In  The Fox and the Devil  by Kiersten White, Van Helsing's daughter, Anneke, hunts down her father's murderer across Europe. Theoretically, a sapphic cat and mouse game sounds great! However, this one really dropped the ball for me. It turned out astonishingly dull for a murder mystery. I felt like there was a lack of tension, and I wish there was a stronger sense of danger toward the Anneke’s group. I would’ve also liked to have seen more of a push and pull between the two leads. Also, this might partly boil down to personal preference, but the writing style drove me up the wall. It’s told mostly in the first person present tense, which is a tense that is better suited for a contemporary thriller than a historical fantasy that’s supposed to be set during the Victorian period. Moreover, the author has a habit of favoring short, choppy sentences. You can take a look at this line of dialogue here: “No he didn’t. It was her. This woman. This Diavola. She killed him, and I found ...

Lucy Undying  by Kiersten White introduces a  Dracula  reimagining where Lucy does not die but instead spends a century trying to find a way to kill her maker. Since gothic literature holds a place near and dear to my heart, this was one of my most highly anticipated reads of the year. But oh, boy! This book suffers from inconsistent writing—both in terms of quality and characters' voices. It felt almost like I was reading two different novels that were haphazardly stitched together, and the tonal whiplash kept throwing me off. It vacillates between gorgeous, biting prose and some of the most juvenile, cringe-inducing dialogue scenes I've had the misfortune to read (like who on Earth calls their partner "my little butter chicken")? It's a shame because the book's cover is a breathtaking masterpiece. I just wished that the interior reflected that. Thank you, NetGalley and Del Rey, for providing with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Mack comes from an abusive past and knows how to hide and avoid attracting attention to herself, so when she receives an offer to play in a massive hide-and-seek competition at an abandoned theme park for a chance to win $50,000, she accepts. However, she gradually begins to realize that a far more sinister plot is at work and she’ll have to work with the other contestants to survive. Going into Hide by Kiersten White, I wanted to love this book so badly since battle royale is one of my favorite sub-genres in fiction (i.e. Alice in Borderland, Hunger Games, Squid Games). However, Hide unfortunately lacks the well-fleshed out and compelling characters that make the others in its vein so successful. Instead we’re given an obnoxious cast of caricatures whom—asides from Mack and Ava—I didn’t remotely feel invested in. It didn’t help either that the cast of 14 contestants are simultaneously dumped on readers all at once or that the story constantly switches POVs mid-chapter. I think the s...