As a thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an advanced reader copy I shall give an honest review of Emily McGovern’s “Bloodlust & Bonnets.” From start to finish this graphic novel held my interest for its nod to classic novels and intelligent use of wit and comedy. Its use of comedy created a well-meaning group of players whose unlikely friendship adds to the stories' ability to summon elements of 19th-century literature namely societal norms. I found this graphic novel immensely enjoyable and recommend it to those who enjoy classic novels and slapstick comedy. I highly recommend this and give it four out of five stars on good reads.

Bloodlust & Bonnets was kind of fun, but really all over the place in a way that wasn't truly fulfilling. I don't know how to describe it any better than that.

I think this was supposed to be a mad-cap adventure but mostly it's just a little bit mad. I did super love the minimalist drawings. How expressive the characters seem with just eyes and head tilts and, occasionally, eyebrows. That was easy to love.

Not so easy to love was the story. The characters run around willy-nilly without anything like a plan. The antagonists don't even have master plans; they're operating more at the level of school-yard intrigue.

I would probably give this author another try in the future; hopefully future adventures are a little less pointlessly silly.

I was lucky enough to receive a copy of the graphic novel Bloodlust and Bonnets by Emily McGovern via Netgalley. The Graphic novel can only be described as a tongue in cheek send up of such novels as Pride and Prejudice and Dracula. Here we see a group of characters who really would probably not meet and they were Lucy a debutant, Lord Byron the Poet and Sham who could be described as kind of Bounty Hunter as they try and catchup with female vampires. I did like the story but I was not keen on the artwork as much as I have in other graphic novels that I have read also the character of Byron did get on my nerves a bit. For this reason I am giving Bonnets and Bloodlust 3 Stars

This was a cute graphic novel and I liked the art style. But it was a little confusing. However, historical fiction, isn't my favorite genre, so it's more of a me thing.

This book was EVERYTHING and I LOVED IT. I stumbled upon Emily McGovern's My Life as a Background Slytherin webcomic earlier this year as I am an avid Harry Potter fan, and once I got obsessed with that I was super excited to hear she was making a full length graphic novel and absolutely thrilled when I found it on NetGalley!

Anyhoo, I love her art style: simple on the faces, detail everywhere else; nice color work and my ever-favorite twirls :-)

As for the plot, it was a stereotypical early 19th century British vampire hunting only with convoluted twists and hilarity at every turn. Lucy, our heroine, picks up sidekicks (or is she the sidekick?) as easily as candy, including Lord Byron, an unknown gendered vampire hunter, and the amazing psychic French gigantic eagle named Napoleon. Need I say more? (Probably, but I really don't want to spoil anything!)

I loved this new graphic novel!

This story was set in the nineteenth century, with Lord Byron as one of the main characters. Along with two friends, Lucy and Sham, Lord Byron searches for a vampire Lady Violet Travesty. Each character has their own secret reason for joining in the vampire hunt. There were loads of other fantastical elements as well, including a succubus and a talking castle.

I laughed the entire time I was reading this story. Each of the characters were exaggerated in a hilarious way. Lord Byron was in love with himself and didn’t pay attention to the people around him. Sham was serious and spoke the truth with no filter to protect the feelings of others (when Lucy thinks that Sham likes her the same way that she likes Sham, Sham replies with yes I do like girls, just not you). Lucy was kind of clueless to people around her, and she was blinded by her desire to join the vampire cult. These characters were hilarious together!

This was such a funny graphic novel! I highly recommend it!

Thank you Andrews McMeel Publishing for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

★★,5☆☆ | I really wanted to like it, guys!

I got this ARC AGES AGO and at first, I somehow missed the archive date (thanks, ADHD) so I was SUPER excited when it appeared again!!

Sadly, when I finally got to it I realised one thing.

I don't have much fun reading it????

And it was supposed to be FUNNY! Come on, it's a JANE AUSTEN'S HEROINE fighting vampires with LORD BYRON and A COOL BUTCH GIRL!!!

And yet, I was barely chuckling every now and then.

I think it fell flat for me because I'm used to things being QUICK and RIGHT THERE so the jokes seemed to me somehow elongated like when your uncle is trying to be funny at a family party but he had a few drinks already so he's laughing at his own jokes (only, you know, not racist).

If the pace was somehow faster, I think I would LOVE it though.

I liked how expressive the art was while so minimalistic and the LGBTQ+ rep and the Squad and many many things.

It was just hard to get through when my attention kept wandering.

It was so funny.
I really like these crazy ideas to mix and match past with fantasy. I've read a kind of similar comic in Hungarian, and it was about poets and zombies.
This is just as is, but with English poets and vampires and withes and talking castles. It was so absurd, so crazy, that it's definitely my taste.
Thanks.

DNF'd a couple pages in and had no interest in continuing. The art is fun but the characters and writing are pretty boring.

Thank you NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book.

The book is set in the early nineteenth century and reminds me of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The protagonist is Lucy and along with Sham and Lord Byron are trying to find the leader of the vampire cult. Along the way they kill a bunch of vampires and they uncover secrets about themselves and each other.

The book in its entirety is fun, although I didn't like the graphics and it somehow made it hard for me to remember what each dialogue was about. The protagonist, Lucy, even though she started out as dynamic, driven woman, she turned out to be so annoying. Lord Byron and Sham were much more interesting than Lucy.

All in all, it's a fun graphic novel and if you are a fan of the Regency period, then I think you'll enjoy this one.

3,5 stars!
Fun and entertaining! I loved the art style and sarcastic humor! The representation and diversity were a breath of fresh air and I appreciated that in a graphic novel.
In terms of the plot, it was slightly longer than I expected with some pacing issues, but other than that, it was a fun, quirky read with fantastic characters!

Thank you net galley and the publisher for providing me a copy of this book.
I have one word for it
"MASTERPIECE"
This was my first ever graphic novel and I absolutely adored it. As soon as I started reading this one, I got hooked. Literally. First of all let me appreciate the art, its phenomenal.
I loved the character development and the world building. Everything about it was just amazing. I would recommend it to everyone.
This was really cute and addicting

I wish I liked this comic more. I like the webcomic My Life As a Background Slytherin by the same author/artist, so I thought I would like this, too. It was fun, but I think the sense of humor just wasn't for me. I enjoyed it, but I don't know enough about Lord Byron or Walter Scott to get all the jokes. I think a lot of book lovers and comic readers will enjoy it, but it wasn't for me. If you know more than I do about the people featured in the comic and you enjoy a wacky historical vampire adventure and french psychic birds, then this comic is for you.

A graphic novel about vampires, Regency London, the importance of having pockets in your ballgowns, talking yet extremely incompetent castles, and giant psychic French eagles named Napoleon, all by the creator of My Life as a Background Slytherin. Lucy is a young lady so bored by the restrictions of Regency society that she goes on a murderous rampage during a polite stroll in the countryside. This brings her to the attention of a) the scandalous, glamorous Lady Travesty, who wants Lucy to join her "secret ancient immortal vampire cult", and b) Lord Byron ("you know, from books"), who thinks Lucy slaughtered all those pretentious gentlemen because she knew they were vampires, and who now wants the two of them to join up as non-exclusive paramours/vampire-hunting teammates. Before too long, they're joined by a third ally, Sham, a genderqueer bounty hunter who is way more efficient and dedicated to the vampire-hunting mission than anyone else (especially since Lucy is still half-convinced that joining a secret ancient immortal vampire cult sounds like a lot of fun, and that cackling and swanning about is a better lifestyle than dealing with feelings and trying to form real relationships). Lucy soon falls in love with Sham, who remains oblivious.

Eventually the plot becomes so complicated and full of shocking betrayals (tm) that no one seems to know what side anyone is on, what to do next, or even what their original goal was. Which is fine, because Bloodlust & Bonnets isn't really that interested in having a coherent, suspense-filled plot so much as it wants to make lots of puns, have pointless but fascinating side-characters, mock anything associated with Regency romance or vampires, and portray Byron as a shallow narcissist obsessed with his nemesis, Sir Walter Scott, and prone to sulking in bed whenever things don't go his way (which... fair enough).

I've seen several people compare it to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and I think that's an excellent analogy. If you find that sort of silly, random humor annoying, Bloodlust & Bonnets is not the book for you. On the other hand, I enjoyed it a great deal. My one complaint is that it dragged a bit in the middle, and yet the ending is an obvious set up for a potential sequel that immediately made me want to read more.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3048016152

Apparently I already knew this artist from the My Life As a Background Slytherin cartoons, but I didn't read the synopsis before downloading this. I really love those cartoons, so that had me even more hyped to read this when I figured it out!

And this started out very promising: as a silly, laugh-out-loud adventure. As it quickly turned out though, silly humour can get old really really quickly if it's not inventive enough, and this just felt like it repeated a lot of the same jokes. I did still find it funny at times, but not as much as I would have hoped.

Another issue is that there's really not much of a plot at all, which makes the graphic novel very difficult to follow and made it feel incohesive, more like a sequence of unconnected events. Because of this, I didn't end up enjoying this graphic novel as much as I'd initially expected to.

A very confusing and probably problematic aspect of this is the way the presumable non-binary character is handled. They're introduced when Lucy asks: "Are you a boy or a girl?" and they say: 'yes". Which makes it pretty clear to me that they're non-binary, and their actual gender is never made explicit. This is just treated as some joke though, and the character keeps being referred to as a girl without the characters ever having checked which pronouns they use. This felt an awful lot like they kept being misgendered, which made it very hard to enjoy the rest of the story.

This was a very funny graphic novel. I never knew what was going to happen next- vampire hunting at its finest!

I'm familiar with this author from her comics of "My life as a Background Slytherin" and other background characters and I enjoy them so when I heard she was doing a book-well I needed to read it! I really enjoyed this book. It was silly while portraying the seriousness of the characters.

Lucy is a regular lady that is approached to become part of Lady Travesty's vampire community and Lucy thought, "well this seems really interesting and quite unexpected". Lord Byron appears and chases Lady Travesty off, since he's a vampire hunter, and Lucy joins him because why not-but really she wants to know more about joining Lady Travesty. Lord Byron is completely incompetent which adds to the hilarity, he completely bungles even the simplest of tasks and is so arrogant but also he believes Lucy to be 1) his sidekick and 2) madly in love with him, even though she tells him at every turn that no, she does not like him.

This book is very much in the spirit of Jane Slayre or Pride and Prejudice and Zombies but with a comedic slant.

A fan of McGovern's webcomic "My Life as a Background Slytherin," but tired of feisty sword-wielding Regency misses fighting vampires, I began this book with trepidation, and got exactly what I expected: McGovern's particular brand of humor applied to vampire killing debutantes. And it was fine. There were moments that were genuinely humorous, but McGovern went with the school of comedy that repetition makes a joke funnier (which is often the case, it's true). Unfortunately, it didn't always pan out that way. Nevertheless, for absurdist historical drollery this book is a great find, with lots of diverse representation and tongue-in-cheek commentary on male fragility and romance novel tropes. This would make for a really good comparison read for a high school curriculum which already includes Austen or a Bronte. It simply isn't as endearing as one might hope.

Lucy is a rebellious young woman living in the Regency Era of Great Britain. After a close encounter with a vampire, Lady Violet Travesty, Lucy is saved by Lord Byron, a flippant poet, and is later joined by Sham, a seemingly emotionless bounty hunter. The three form a group to hunt down Lady Travesty and find themselves on a wild goose chase throughout Britain. From parties with vampires, to forests with succubi, the group perseveres all the while gruesomely fighting, awkwardly flirting, and endlessly exploiting each other.

For readers who enjoyed Nimona, by Noelle Stevenson, you will thoroughly enjoy this book as well. It is a better version of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, with perfectly timed humor, not-so-subtle tropes, and plenty of graphic action. I loved that even though the facial expressions were minimal (nobody has mouths), their emotions clearly depicted what the character was feeling. While this story is a bit longer than some graphic novels and has more text, I feel it contains the perfect amount of detailing, from the plot to the illustrations. A hilariously fantastic read!