Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me a free advanced copy of this book to read and review.

I always love a vampire book and Vampires, Hearts, & Other Dead Things did not disappoint. This is one of my new favorite books. I love it.

This book takes you on a roller coaster ride of all the emotions. Your respect and enjoy the main character in this story a lot. Great read that I could not put down.

Thank you to the author, publisher, and Net Galley for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest opinion.

I loved this book. It wasn't what I expected though. It tugged at my heart strings. Victoria and her father are huge vampire enthusiasts. Her Dad is dying of cancer. He talks her into going on the trip to New Orleans that they planned to go together. Henry, her ex-best friend, ends up going with her. It really is a book about a girl struggling to deal with the her feelings about her father dying. I loved the "game" played with Nicholas. I need to visit New Orleans ASAP. Henry needs an award for the BEST friend ever. I just adored him. I highly recommend this book.

This was such beautiful tale about learning to live when things aren't pretty. The process of letting go and going through grief when you feel like it's not earned. It has that magical realism feel with her search for the vampires to save her dad. The growth in relationships and friendship. I absolutely loved this read

First off, I normally don't read books like this from past experiences and tend to want my fiction to be an escape. BUT this one just sounded so fun that I couldn't not read it. I really enjoyed the premise of this story and understood all of the characters actions (even though I'm not sure I liked her). The setting was well written and exactly what I wanted to imagine for this sort of story. Overall, I would read another book by this author and I might even re-read this one in the future. I mean, I always love going back to vampire books!

I originally thought that this was going to be a fun book, but it was a beautifully written book about grief and the lengths you’ll go to save someone that you love. Victoria and her dad have always been obsessed with vampires and when her father is dying from cancer she goes to New Orleans to find a vampire to turn him. I loved New Orleans as a setting. I have been there multiple times and the writing made me feel that I was right back in the heart of the city. This was a fast paced book which I enjoyed. I look forward to reading more from this author.

Absolutely loved it. Handled grief very well. Had me sobbing at many parts.

*Thank you to the publisher for this eARC.

Can seeking immortality really help you past your grief? Victoria believes if she find a vampire and convince him/her to turn her, she will be able to save her dying father. What she discovers is that immortality isn't what she truly needs. She needs to learn to live. With the help of Henry, her true soulmate, and Nicholas, a boy she believes to be a vamp, she learns that it's ok to let go and to live again. I was excited to receive this book, especially because it had vampires in in, but it turned into a book about dealing with grief and death, more so than vampires. Definitely one for higher level readers in HS.

I will be recommending this book for purchase as an addition to our school library. Thank you for the opportunity to read.

I thought that this was a fantastic debut by Margie Fuston. This book tells the story of Victoria, who grew up watching vampire movies with her dad and now considers herself to be the resident vampire expert. So when Victoria’s dad gets sick and the doctors are ready to give up she knows exactly what she has to do. Victoria enlists the help of childhood friend and one time crush, Henry in order to track down the elusive creature that might be able to save her father, a New Orleans based vampire.

Going in you have to know that this is a book that will tear at your heartstrings. Having recently lost a close family member, I found it very easy to relate to Victoria’s state of mind. In many ways, throughout the course of this book, Victoria is a type of vampire. She is unable to process her emotions and is so mired down with grief that she has forgotten how to truly live. In fact, any time she gets close to experiencing any kind of joy such as starting to want to paint again, an activity that she used to love, Victoria feels incredibly guilty and pushes those feeling aside.

“… But this easy happiness with Henry feels like betrayal. It’s just as bad as grieving while he’s still alive”

It’s only thanks to the unexpected game that Victoria finds herself thrown into in her quest to find a New Orleans vampire, that she starts to recognize her “undead” state. Her time in New Orleans forces Victoria to slowly find ways to recover a version of her old self.

“Each task gets me closer to what I want, but each one also sets free something inside me: the warm yellow glow of happiness from laughing with Henry, the pulsing purple fear of almost getting caught that so easily shifted to excitement when we weren’t.”

This book was much lighter on the fantasy element than I had expected when I picked it up. True vampires make very few appearances and whether or not they are actually vampires is somewhat left up to the reader to decide. I did think that the addition of vampire movie/tv show quotes to the beginning of each chapter in this book was a nice touch. It’s something that will appeal to fans of the vampire genre (like me) and also provides great commentary on the things Victoria tackles at different times in the book such as the importance of family, the value of life and the pitfalls of immortality.

And of course, no review of this book would be complete without a discussion of Victoria and Henry’s friendship turned romance. I believe that everyone needs a friend like Henry in their life. Though Victoria and Henry are technically not on speaking terms at the beginning of the book, Henry doesn’t hesitate to come with her to New Orleans, because he sees that Victoria needs him. He is right behind Victoria no matter what crazy idea she comes up with. Despite the fact that the two obviously have unresolved feelings, Henry does his best to help Victoria cope with her grief. It seems fitting that it is Henry’s presence that forces Victoria to start really feeling things again. He’s the one person she allows herself to have fun with. Their friendship turned romance definitely serves as the bright spot in what can be a very dark read at times.

Vampires, Hearts and Other Dead Things definitely made it onto my list of top reads of 2021. If you enjoy reading books that make you feel something than this is definitely a great book for you.

Trigger warning: parental death

What completely wrecked me about this book was that as I was reading about Victoria and her father's losing battle to pancreatic cancer, I was catapulted back a few years to when I lost my own Dad to cancer. Now, while our fathers are completely different personality-wise, I think I can relate to that question of "what lengths would you go to to save someone you love--particularly a parent"?
I appreciated this book's absolute crazy jam packed pop culture references to all things Vampire. That really added something extra to the story, hyping it up on another level and truly engrossing you in Victoria and her father's obsession. I will not lie and say that I DID NOT cry while reading this story. It was fascinating and well written and done so in a way that lets the reader, particularly a reader with a similar experience, experience ALL THE FEELS. TO write about the way we experience grief is tough and Margie Fuston did an amazing job. I could fill in this review with plot description, but you get that in the blurb, and to be honest, it's so much deeper of an experience in this case to read the book. What I will say is that this book will leave you feeling emotional towards the people you love, even if they aren't your biological family.

“You think I’m delusional,”
“No,” After a long moment he says, “I think you’re sad.”

Wow—what an absolutely beautifully fun but also sad story. Victoria and her Dad are SUPER fans of vampires and everything related to them. A few years back, vampires revealed themselves as real before going into hiding. When Victoria learns her Dad is dying, she goes on a trip to New Orleans with her distant friend Henry (who thinks vampires are a hoax) to find a vampire to keep him alive.

Let me say—this book felt like such a love story to New Orleans. Margie truly knows the city well and each little detail immersed you into the novel further. It’s also a shout out to us vampire lovers—I adored how Margie put pop culture vampire quotes at the start of each chapter.

“This city is a vampire—beautiful and old and seductive, living off the energy of the people it attracts.”

Victoria’s journey around New Orleans with Henry—along with a mysterious Nicholas—was charming and sweet to read. However, this book also felt heavy majority of the time, which isn’t a bad thing just a surprise! Victoria’s grief was clear throughout the novel and while on her trip. Seeing her growth throughout is rewarding.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to read a complex character, be saturated with a great setting and feel comforted by the ending.

“I am empty but not broken. Empty things can be filled again.” 🌤🤍

*Thank you NetGallery and Simon and Schuster for an ARC of this wonderful book in exchange for an honest review.*

The premise is intriguing, and I easily sympathized with the protagonist. Her desire to do anything to keep her father is so admirable, but her actions were reckless and her treatment of family members also struggling was to such an extent that I didn’t feel sympathetic for long.

This book reminds you to hold love dear in every way that exists. It is brutally and beautifully written. I loved reading it.

Margie Fuston is the best debut I've read this year. Vampires, Hearts, and Other Dead Things is an introspective book on living with grief, from the perspective of the eighteen-year-old Victoria, a vampire-obsessed prospective art student with a father given a terminal cancer diagnosis. Deciding she's the last best hope to save his life, Victoria flies to New Orleans in search of a vampire--one came out years ago to the national media, only to quickly go back into hiding. People aren't sure if vampires are real, but if they are? Surely they're in New Orleans. Henry, Victoria's former childhood friend and crush, escorts her, and the two are put on a vampiric quest to prove Victoria can truly live, as being a vampire does involve a lot of living. Victoria does the tasks--eat, be merry, steal things, kiss boys under the moon, but she only tailspins. Can she truly be happy--truly let herself feel any emotion at all--when her father is dying and she's the last hope to save his life?

Like I said, Vampires, Hearts, and Other Dead Things spends a lot of time in Victoria's head. Discussions on grief, on emotional health, on coping, happiness, the future, death, what it all means if you're a vampire--it's drenched in thoughts. Victoria has to overcome her past with Henry, learn how to live without her dad, and win the vampire's game so she doesn't have to. Victoria can be a hard character to love--she's willing to believe a lot to get what she wants, and willing to put anyone around her in danger for the hope she can turn her father into a vampire. It's a hard ask for readers, but I think Fuston makes it work by relentlessly reminding us where Victoria is in the grieving process--denial, and boatloads of it.

Only two things jump out at me to make this less than a five star read--I found it difficult to believe two teenagers straight out of high school would make this major trip so spur of the moment (and that two sets of parents would be totally cool with it), and the climax felt incredibly quick given the time spent with the tasks. Some New Orleans details felt poorly threaded--the why of it all a sketch without color--but overall it's a solid addition to the vampire book crew.

Vampires, Hearts, & Other Dead Things is such an incredibly heartfelt book, and frankly a love story about a young woman's beautiful relationship with her dying father. Victoria and her dad have always had a strong bond in general, but extra especially about vampiric lore. They love the movies, the shows, the books, and became extra fascinated when people claiming to be true vampires came forward. But when her dad's cancer is diagnosed as terminal, Victoria simply cannot come to terms with it, as you can imagine.

Her dad, wanting only the very best for his daughter, insists that she go on a trip they had planned to New Orleans. She doesn't want to, obviously, but then she has an idea: she can find an actual vampire and thereby remedy her dad's death sentence. She agrees to go with next-door neighbor and former longtime friend/now ex-friend/always crush Henry, but only so that she can track down a vampire to, you know, do his or her vampire duties.

It's gutting, honestly. You don't even have the chance to find it a little strange that Victoria believes she can find an actual vampire, because she's just so incredibly sympathetic. She feels completely let down by conventional medicine, so she's willing to try anything, and the author does an amazing job making us understand Victoria so well. I understood why she was pouring her whole heart into this (likely fruitless) search- because she couldn't do anything else. She felt beyond helpless, and needed to focus on something, anything other than her father's likely impending death.

And the trip to New Orleans does help, not always in the way she expects. She and Henry will obviously have time to discuss what went wrong with their friendship. She is able to explore this beautiful city (and I loved the way the author describes it- nails it, more accurately), and we get the true pleasure of seeing Victoria live a little.

Through the entire story, I rooted for Victoria. Not necessarily that she'd find a vampire, just that she would find peace somehow. I adored Henry from the start, and I loved the characters they encountered along their way in New Orleans, I equally loved Victoria's family. And certainly, I loved how Victoria had to sort of find herself again during the process, and begin to really delve deeper into all her relationships- with her family, with Henry, and most of all, with herself.

Bottom Line: Such a gorgeous and heartfelt story, told in a wonderfully unique way.

The premise is curious, with Victoria needing to find vampires to save her dying father. They both have always believed in them.

And, she chooses to go on an adventure with her childhood best friend to find vampires. Rather than face the reality of what is happening to her father. This leads the book into fairly predictable elements, with a straightforward plot that may be a tad bit easy to predict.

But, the complexity comes with the emotions the author has spent time on developing. There is tons of tremendous emotional growth and exploration on a topic that can be difficult to make others react towards. It made me cry. It made me smile. It is an easy read with immense emotional depth to it.

Thank you to Simon & Schuster/Margaret K. McElderry Books, the author, and NetGalley for providing me with this eARC in exchange for an honest review. This book will release August 24, 2021.

"Nobody knows if vampires are inherently bad or if they're like people—bad and good mixed together so thoroughly it's hard to tell who is which until someone's ripping your heart out."

This book perhaps perfectly illustrates that the way you feel about a story is not just a matter of it encompassing all the things you love, but also it reaching you at the right time. I have absolutely no doubt that if I were going through a turbulent time in my life, I would have latched onto this book the way I did A Monster Calls my senior year of high school, like a life raft. Because Vampires, Hearts & Other Dead Things hits so many of those same elements that made me love the former: grief, denial, learning to let go, a fantasy element—this one is even vampires, which are my favorite! But I don't feel the same pain as the main character, Victoria, so ultimately it didn't affect me as much as I know it would have done in other circumstances. (Honestly, I was worried while reading that I wasn't going to cry at all at the ending, since I didn't truly share in Victoria's despair through the rest of the book. I'm glad to say that I was wrong.)

Victoria's father, from whom she got her love of vampires, is dying of cancer. While she is focused on being the strong one in her family, the one who is determined that he is going to recover—even after his terminal diagnosis—and the one in denial, her mother and older sister are far more realistic. They would never do what she does: have a revelation, while watching Interview With the Vampire that there's only one solution to her problems. So at her dad's behest, she goes on the father-daughter trip to New Orleans that never quite came to pass with her sort-of estranged friend Henry and gets more than she bargained for, in so many ways.

Victoria is a great, sometimes-unlikeable heroine, but one with whom I actually identified despite that. (Actually, I think that's part of why I didn't cry so much at the end of this book; I was too busy being like her and compartmentalizing.) Since she's a teenager, she makes some heartbreaking choices that made me want to reach out and shake her and ask her what the hell she thought she was doing, but—that's what being a teenager is like, and in that she's an extremely realistic protagonist. There were a few times where I thought that the anger that other characters were feeling towards her were totally justified, but at the same time I almost admired the fact that she knew she was willing to be incredibly selfish, reckless, and disappointing in order to save her dad. Like, there was just something about that level of purpose that I've always admired in characters/people, and Victoria certainly had it. (But that's not to say I condone any of her more eyebrow-raising choices, because some of them were... certainly Choices.) Of her relationships, the two strongest are with her dad and Henry; the first centered around their mutual love for all things vampiric, and the second despite an incident that broke up their friendship, or so Victoria thinks. The depth of caring Victoria has for her father is immense, and I was honestly glad to see how close they were. And because of that closeness, it was also easy to feel the distance between her and her mother and sister, and to a degree, Henry. But he is the perfectly patient friend we all wish we had when going through something difficult, even if as a reader I simultaneously wished that he wouldn't be quite so forgiving sometimes. (Also, there's a description of him doing the CUTEST THING EVER for her when they were kids using stuff from the grocery store. It's not weird, it's cute, I promise!)

Apparently I have a thing for books that purport to be about something else, even in part, but are really about learning to deal with grief. Like, I'm pretty sure I will never get over that; even unconsciously I gravitate toward that, and I often wonder if it's because I'm attempting to prepare myself by internalizing those lessons. These are one of the strongest parts of this book, and the way in which they're conveyed—particularly the "lesson" (I hesitate to call it that because the book in no way feels like it's preaching) about living is accomplished in an extremely effective way. I don't want to say too too much about how this plan ends up going, as I think it's more impactful to actually experience it yourself alongside Victoria, but suffice it to say that the reveal left me shocked, embarrassed, angry on her behalf, and ultimately sympathetic, to a degree. I think you can probably make an educated guess about what happens based on my feelings, but reading that scene is a whole different thing—as is the reality of what she thinks she wants, which is actually rather harrowing when it comes to pass.

Really entertaining, full of complicated characters and emotions, and an excellent twist on learning to love life. Also, the fact that there's an old lady who says "Undergraduate English majors tend to be a bag of pricks" is ICONIC.

Her father is dying and vampires are real. These are the two facts that drive Victoria to New Orleans, searching for a way to save her father when the oncologist says that they can't do anything else. She and her ex-best friend/crush/neighbor (it's messy, which is a theme in this book) end up in the French Quarter hunting for vampires, and she finds a whole lot more than she bargained for.

I'll start with the positives for this book. The plot and setting in this book are absolutely phenomenal. The pacing is fantastic. Never once did the book feel too rushed or too slow. As a person who loves New Orleans, I adored the way the author described the city. The descriptions are vivid and beautifully done. If plot and setting are a major selling point for you when reading, this book is for you.

Now for what I didn't like so much. I want to preface this by saying that this is an entirely personal preference and does not reflect the author's skill. The main character was infuriating, and I wanted to shake some sense into her at every turn. She is going through something that is incredibly traumatic and is processing it (well, not processing it) in her own way. I understand this. I have empathy for her. But I could not handle her. If I can't connect with the character, I just can't enjoy a book, and I couldn't connect with her.