I loved this smart, unique vampire novel about passion and oppression and being a woman in a male-dominated world, and about power and personhood. It's erotic and violent and enthralling, and I'm recommending it highly. The use of Buenos Aires as both a character and setting is brilliant, and within the larger story are smaller ones of great delight and importance to the novel as a whole. Go to your favorite cemetery--not one where the stones are uniform and plain, but one where great excess has been used to communicate grief, and find a nice mausoleum, and sit on the stairs, and read this book.

I absolutely LOVED this book! The rich, melancholy prose, the frankness of the characters thoughts, the beauty of their different relationships with death and dying and desire. I cannot recommend this book enough and I can’t wait to get my hands on a physical copy.

Thanks Netgalley for allowing me to read this book. When two women meat from different time periods, anything can happen. One is trying to hide who she really is and the other is still comin to terms with her life. This was a quick read.

Thank you Netgalley and Dutton for allowing me to read an advanced copy of Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk in exchange for my honest opinion.

I always hate dnfing books I receive arcs for, but unfortunately this one fell flat for me. I

I don't know if this was just an issue with translation, as it was originally published in Spanish, but it felt like everything was being spoon fed to us in regards to the plot. We as readers didn't get to figure anything out as we were being told directly what was happening. There were moments where the writing style really hit it's stride and I could get into it, but then it would become broken and choppy and wouldn't reconnect until several pages later.

it's really unfortunate for me as sapphic vampires are everything I love, but I just unfortunately couldn't get into this one.

I really enjoyed the first half of this novel, the time we spent with our vampire main character. Her story, filled with tragedy, is lush and compelling. I began to check out when we got to the present and our other main character's struggle as her mother succumbs to a terminal illness, perhaps because I simply do not wish to consider that topic for too long. But the ending reeled me back in as the women entered one another's orbit. While the final pages came at me fast, I enjoyed the story's resolution. Check this one out when it releases in March!

I DEVOURED this book. Very Interview With The Vampire. Gorgeous writing. I just wish this book was longer. Love, love, love. Haunting and delicious.

Thank you Netgalley for one of my favorite reads this year! My review is unbiased and my own.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for providing this arc in exchange for an honest review.

I was very interested in the premise of this book, but it just didn’t work for me. The story happens mostly by exposition and I found it terribly boring; the reader is told everything that happens, never seeing the facts. After a while, I just didn’t have the patience to keep reading the same thing over and over again.
The characters also didn’t captivate me. Or the fact that it’s basically two stories into one. It was so uninteresting that I skimmed through the rest because I couldn’t be bothered to read anymore.

I received this book for free for an honest unbiased review from Netgalley.

Just what I was looking for sapphic.

Thank you to NetGalley and PENGUIN GROUP Dutton for the ARC of this book!

I was very intrigued by the premise of this book, and it started out very promising, but then fell flat for me in part two. Part one you are introduced to a vampire who arrives in Buenos Aires in the nineteenth century. While she's not the most likeable character, I enjoyed reading about her struggles of living in the human world while always having a thirst for blood. She spent most of her early vampire life not caring if she killed while feeding. Part two focuses on a modern day woman who is struggling with her own pain, and the worsening condition of her sick mother. This is where I started to lose interest in the book. I enjoyed finding out how the two characters would connect in the modern day, but I never really felt like I connected to the human MC. I kind of wish we had switched back to the vampire MC after their two worlds collide. I was more interested in side characters' stories than I was either MC. I'd recommend this for people who really want a more character focused vampire story that deals with loneliness.

'Thirst' is a richly atmospheric sapphic, feminist, and gothic vampire novel recently translated into English. In one storyline, we follow our vampire as she travels through the shadows of an ever-changing Buenos Aires over the course of centuries. In another, a mother grapples with her own mother's terminal illness. 'Thirst' takes its time in tackling themes of grief, death, mortality, desire and yearning, loneliness, and the limits of womens' agency. Occassionally, the emotion did not shine through on the page as much as it could've despite the content, and the ending felt rushed. However, it remains a haunting story full of imagery not soon forgotten.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.

At once beautiful,
sensual, historical
and fantastical.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I write haiku reviews but am happy to provide more feedback.

Review of Uncorrected eBook File

In the nineteenth century, a woman becomes a vampire and travels to a new home, only to discover the area is in the throes of a pandemic. She realizes that no one understands what it is like to be what she is, even though people have invented a variety of stories to explain her kind. As Buenos Aires grows, so does the woman, finding ways to fit in, to keep herself undiscovered.

In the present day, Alma, a woman struggling with her mother’s terminal illness, meets the vampire woman in a cemetery.

What lies ahead for the two women?

=========

The story, told in the first person, follows the lives of two women, the vampire and Alma. Both grab the reader’s attention; their situations are well-explained. The portion of the story dealing with the outbreak of yellow fever is particularly strong; throughout the telling of the tale, an eerie feeling underscores the unfolding narrative.

The narrative is atmospheric and melancholy, less a tale of vampires than it is an introspective contemplation of loneliness, grief, and survival. Though the narrative is dark, the emotion-filled prose is lush but the denouement may not be what the reader expects [or desires].

I received a free copy of this book from PENGUIN GROUP Dutton, Dutton and NetGalley and am voluntarily leaving an honest review.
#Thirst #NetGalley

I enjoyed the author’s voice and the atmosphere of this Gothic vampire tale but the entire plot felt slow. I kept waiting for more to happen in the story. It spanned several timelines in Europe and in Buenos Aires but there were no real meaningful relationships that were explored.

The story is set in Buenos Aires, it spans 150 years and is told in two different timelines. It stars around 1870, during the yellow fever epidemic and the war of the Triple Alliance. The Buenos Aires of that time was a rudimentary post colonial city that was trying to become the welcoming Metropolis that was known to be at the beginning of the twentieth century. In those cobblestone streets, lit by gas, and mixing with the most varied population of immigrants, walks a young woman from Europe who brings with her a secret and a curse: vampirism. As readers we walk the streets full of pestilence and decay, witnessing her internal struggles to satisfy her need for love and companionship, and her insatiable thirst for blood. This is the most atmospheric portion of the book and the descriptions are vivid and gripping, to a point that is inevitable to feel trapped in that environment that smells of death and despair.
The second half of the book takes the form of some sort of diary in which each portion starts with a date. It is narrated by a young mother that is struggling with her own physical ailments and the inexorable deterioration in the health of her mother, victim of a degenerative disease that affects her autonomy and her ability to communicate. One day, her mother gives her a key that she’s being keeping all her life and seems to be some kind of family heirloom. It is the key to a mausoleum that is located in the Recoleta Cemetery, an unlikely place to be chosen by his mother as a place to be buried. This has to have another meaning, one that transcends her, her mother, and probably any other known ancestor. Looking for the answer to this enigma, our narrator comes across the protagonist of the first half of the book and evil is unleashed again on the streets of modern Buenos Aires.
This book is more than its plot and its atmosphere. It is also a study about grief, about the feeling of being trapped in a body that hurts, and harassed by the urgencies that make us want to be somewhere else, to be another person. Whether because of their suffering bodies or infinite thirst, the women in this book fight against themselves and only find the relief of liberation in each other.
This is the first book I have read by Marina Yuszczuk, but it is enough for me to know that her work is part of this new wave of Latin American female authors (Mariana Enriquez, Agustina Bazterrica, Silvia Moreno Garcia) who do not hesitate to throw themselves headlong into genre literature, and I celebrate it because the result is magnificent.

Having written my own somewhat different take on the vampire genre in my novel, Redemption, I was eager to see what Marina Yuszczuk's take on genre would be. It was a very enjoyable read. Her slow, gothic, first-person narrative style is entertaining, and she takes vampirism to a current, very nowtro place, including some LGBTQIAP+ elements. I enjoyed reading about a vampire in both old and current Buenos Aires as it is somewhere I am not familiar with. The combination of Buenos Aires and its Recoleta Cemetery along with the history of the town and vampires along with a young mother/journalist who is also dealing with the impending death of her mother seemed unbeatable to me. The two stories it tells are good—one from the viewpoint of the vampire, the other from the grieving young mother—and when they come together it is a tremendous ending.

I loved the beautiful moody, gothic vibe I got with this book. This is a perfect read around fall/Halloween and I can't wait to recommend this to any readers who love vampires or feminist literature with a twist. I can see this listed with other moody, gothic classics in a display such as Wuthering Heights or Frankenstein.

Death and loneliness remain a constant presence for two women navigating life in different centuries in Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk and translated by Heather Cleary.
After long years feasting upon the blood of nineteenth century Europe with others like her who were sadly ended, a lone vampire arrives to Buenos Aires where she bears witness to the advancements of the village toward a more developed city. With civilization encountering a state of decay and chaos as a plague sweeps through the area she’s able to more discreetly mask her feedings and intermingle with humans, at least until the time comes when her impulses force her to act and lock herself within a coffin in a crypt to escape capture. Centuries later in contemporary Buenos Aires, another woman struggles to manage with her mother’s declining health, her own health concerns, and navigating motherhood. After receiving a packet of information from her mother that includes a mysterious key, the woman visits the cemetery mentioned in the documents and eventually encounters the vampire, sparking a fascination between them that forges a new life for each, from which there’s no turning back.
Detailing experiences that each of the women encounter throughout their lives, but specifically in relation to the cemetery, twin stories of death, loneliness, and a consuming desire, often for something deemed to be beyond what you should want, unfold and intertwine. The sense of peace and calmness that was expressed through each of the women’s perspectives of the cemetery resonates well as a shared sentiment, even though many may find them an eerie and grief-filled place as the end for each person’s inevitable fate of death. Though the transition between the vampire’s and contemporary woman’s stories was jarring in the moment, and the latter moved at a slower pace, they were tied together rather well through the prologue, bits of information, and a shared concept of watching others try to combat death, which found their connection and resolution by the swiftly reached end.
Overall, I’d give it a 3.5 out of 5 stars.
*I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

“Buenos Aires stank of stagnant water, of bodies rotting under the sun; its plazas and the courtyards of wealthy families were filled with all manner of plants to scent the air and pretend otherwise, but the entire city was one vast cemetery. A melancholy one, at that, because its living inhabitants were constantly reminded of their endless struggle against decay.”

For a while, I didn’t want to read anything to do with plagues or pandemics, but lately I’ve been craving them, and Thirst is a new favorite. The vampire’s account of the Yellow Fever is haunting and lyrical, and she’s emotionally distanced from it enough that her POV offers a very narrow perspective of how humans react to it. Wealthy people fleeing the city as bodies pile up, every man for themselves as they wonder how long until they get sick. The original Spanish edition was published in October 2020, so I imagine it was written before COVID hit, but the parallels to how our society responded to COVID were interesting.

Then we switch to the mother/daughter’s (unnamed narrator) POV for the second half of the book, which at first is jarring. Now it’s modern day and we get a day by day account of this woman’s comings and goings as she deals with her mother’s rapidly declining health. But I quickly realized the connection between the two narrators. The vampire watched as humans tried to cover up death and survive as best they could, and the daughter watched as doctors forced her mother to stay alive.

Thirst isnt necessarily a story about grief. It’s more about that stage right before you lose someone, when the grief is pending. We go to great lengths to avoid death, which can sometimes be extremely selfish and only delays the inevitable. I really enjoyed the juxtaposition between an immortal vampire who can’t die, but can’t quit live, either, compared to the second narrator whose mother should die, but piece by piece she loses more quality of life until there’s nothing left. It’s a sad, ambiguous book but also brings comfort and logic to some heavy topics that are difficult to make sense of.

**Thank you Isabel DaSilva for reaching out with this arc! All thoughts on this read are entirely my own!**
Posted to: NetGalley, Goodreads, and The Storygraph
Posted on: 6 December 2023

4 out of 5 stars.

Yuszczuk is an author I haven’t heard of before. I was honestly quite surprised when I got an email from Isabel DaSilva inviting me to check out ‘Thirst’, but I decided to give it a chance since I was waiting to hear back from other ARCs at the time, and this one did not disappoint. Told in two different points of views of women who knew different eras of the same city, ‘Thirst’ invokes a sort of self-reflection through its words. Often, I found myself contemplating what it meant to live and what it was to exist- and while I’m not sure if that was one of the main points of this novel, it certainly made relating to the characters a bit easier as they go through similar pangs.
I think what I enjoyed most about this read is how achingly human the characters are. I’m not too deep into women’s fiction reads or more adult genres in general if I’m honest (a glance through my recent reads will show a lot of YA sci-fi and fantasy, and just fairly recently some adult sci-fi and fantasy) so it was a bit different to read about the pains of being a women, a mother, a monster in times where all these expectations and desires are painted upon the female figure. But ‘Thirst’ shows how desperate these two women are to live, to heal, to love themselves and to pick themselves up when it seems like nobody is in their corner to help them. It was different to see more mature characters handling life and desires (and depression and sorrow) and I think that just really stuck out to me in a way that made this book a heavy hitter.

‘Thirst’ may be about two women eventually crossing paths and leaning into one another for unexplainable reasons, for a connection, for a desire to both live yet feel something more than just living, but at it’s heart, it’s about two women who wanted to survive when death lingers deep within them. It’s a poem and a eulogy and a representation of the dying that occurs when you’re still alive, of the decay that lingers within the soul, and of the depression that sinks it’s fangs deep into the flesh of even the seemingly-strongest of people. It’s a reminder of the futile yet beautiful yearning that exists inside of people, and the desire to feel whole.

With echoes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and written in the vein of feminist Gothic writers like Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier, and Carmen Maria Machado, Thirst plays with the boundaries of genre while exploring the limits of female agency, the consuming power of desire, and the fragile vitality of even the most immortal of creatures.