Felt like nothing happened. I love a vampire story, and this one had EVERYTHING for the makings of a great book, but unfortunately the execution fell flat.

It’s the late 1970’s London when Amber and Nicola meet, beginning a bloodthirsty female friendship that wasn’t exactly cut out for all of eternity.

Now, Amber’s had enough of Nicola but to leave puts her in peril of her very life. Nicola is the alpha and lost many previous companions, she’ll stop at nothing to ensure that Amber remains.

The complexities of female friendship is not lost here but there’s a little more at ‘stake’ haha! I enjoyed this one! The varying POV and timelines gives this story great insight. Ambers scheming is fantastic and Nicola’s even better.

Witty, fun and loads of drama!

3.5 stars.

"We Love the Nightlife" by Rachel Koller Croft is the perfect book for you if you love toxic and complicated female friendships, power plays and betrayals, jealousy, disco, dancing, and vampires. It has all of those things in spades. This book is a lot more glitz and glamor and a lot less bloodsucking (though there is *some* bloodsucking). While this story is frequently fun, it feels like it goes on a little long. I enjoyed Nicola and Amber as characters. Nicola is a great, conniving villain. She manipulates everyone around here to keep herself on top and to keep people relying on her for friendship and stability. Amber is naive when Nicola first meets her in 1979. She is a young, married woman who is lost and doesn't know what she wants, but quickly discovers that she wants to be a vampire. Nicola believes she has given Amber everything, that she has done her a favor by turning her into her mini-me, but Amber wants out the more she realizes she is being manipulated. I feel like the ultimate payoff could have come several dozen pages sooner, but when it gets there, it is quite satisfying. I think my ultimate gripe with this book is that there are these frequent bursts of intense and violent exposition, but what is in between these moments can get pretty boring, so you're left waiting for a long time for very little in return. The nightclub scenes are fun, though! I still recommend this book for its flash and pomp and circumstance.

Thank you to NetGalley, Rachel Koller Croft, and Berkley Publishing Group for the complimentary ARC of this book. All opinions are my own. I was not compensated for this review.

This female led vampire book is an interesting take on friendship. The glitzy, clubby backdrop is a nice counterpoint to the bloody, controlling characters.

I'm not a vampire girly, but I fear I may be after reading this! The author's writing really well done and I felt like I was there in London the whole time. I feel like I may also have a crush on these women, especially Amber lol

We Love the Nightlife is a vampire disco toxic friendship character driven tale set in London and it certainly has a vibe. The characters are flawed. The backstabbing is plentiful.

Thank you Berkeley Publishing and Netgalley for the electronic advanced copy.

We Love the Nightlife by Rachel Koller Croft
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In London 1979 Amber is addicted to the dance scene. After meeting the beautiful and intriguing Nicola, Amber is offered a chance at an unending nightlife: as a vampire. Fifty years later there is a tension to their friendship and Amber has to decide to stay or attempt to leave Nicola.
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What I liked:
-I loved the love for disco. I think it got a bad rap and I loved reading about these women who enjoyed a good dance scene.
-There was a sinister suspense to the story that built.
-I was very curious about a couple things and one of the reveals really surprised me!
-The last part got really crazy and I liked how it ended.
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4⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

DNF for me - I couldn't get into it and didn't like the characters. Barely made it through a third of this one.

THIS FED MY VAMPIRE LOVING SOUL. I knew I wanted to read this base off the cover and then went in blind. What a wild, suspenseful ride that kept me on my toes the entire time!!

another disappointing vampire book. and i love vampires. this was just a struggle to read, it wasn't captivating at all. the premise sounded so good, but ultimately fell flat. i just wanted a good book about sapphic vampires

✨ Review ✨ We Love the Nightlife by Rachel Koller Croft

Thanks to Berkley and #netgalley for the gifted advanced copy/ies of this book!

This was maybe one of my most anticipated books of the year. Disco + vampires = yes please!

The book alternates between 1979ish (when Nicola turned Amber into a vampire to be her companion) and the present day (when Amber is having second thoughts about staying with Nicola for forever), as well as several other moments in the past looking at the history of these two women.

In the present day, Amber's desperately trying to learn about Nicola's past and to create an escape plan, but Nicola's trying to open a new disco club with Amber to relive their disco heydays. (heynights?)

This book definitely moves a little slower than I anticipated, doing a lot of personal and innerworld building between these two. I think a little more drama between vampires (especially the peripheral characters in the book) would have amped up the excitement. However, I throughly enjoyed this one, and appreciated the times/settings the author chose to feature here. I did find the last 1/3 of the book flew by, and I stayed up late reading because I couldn't put it down!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: thriller + fantasy + horror-ish
Setting: London (past and present)
Reminds me of: So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison
Pub Date: August 20, 2024

Read this if you like:
⭕️ vampires and all their associated drama
⭕️ disco music and the night life
⭕️ London and big city adventures
⭕️ French 75s

This is a book for all the party girls out there, as author Rachel Koller Croft explains in the acknowledgements of her latest book, We Love the Nightlife. Her second book is certainly an ode to clubbing, and joyfully celebrates early 20-somethings dressing up and making out with dudes on the dance floor. (And just dudes: Don’t let the suggestively sapphic cover fool you into thinking anyone in this story is anything other than straight.)

But We Love the Nightlife is also a story about vampires. Two vampires specifically, and the toxic friendship they have. Sucking blood, however, is a secondary concern in their undead lives; what drives them and the plot is the urge to flee from or maintain power, with one trying to wrench herself away from the other who ruthlessly controls her existence.

The two vampiric gal pals have been together for decades and still party hard in the London club scene, so much so that they seldom leave their neighborhood (other vamps have marked their territory around them) and never leave the city (though, admittedly, the logistics of traveling when the sun will kill you is understandably tricky).

When the book starts, the younger one, Amber, has finally realized after forty or so years as a vampire that her relationship with her maker, Nicola, isn’t so great. She realizes this when her master violently murders her former husband, who in 2021 has become a senior citizen since Amber turned vamp back in 1979. Nicola kills him because Amber broke the rule to never contact anyone from your human life when she “accidentally” brushed into her ex one night. He had no idea it was her of course—she still looked twenty-three, not sixty-four—but it was enough for Nicola to literally rip him to shreds, and enough for Amber to finally realize that she wanted out from under Nicola’s thumb.

[more at link]

We Love The Nightlife by Rachel Koller Croft, When the story begins we meet Amber she is following her husband Malcolm and his wife Gertrude when she accidentally owned purpose runs in to Malcolm while waiting outside of a restaurant for his wife to pay the ticket this is when Amber‘s maker Nicola shows up and warns her away. Amber will not go until she gets a Promise from Nickola that she will not kill him, something that Nicola easily gives but doesn’t keep. This as they say was the straw that broke the camel‘s back because when Amber learns her husband was murdered in his bathroom she knows Nicola did it. Amber and Nicola are vampires and Nicola is the one who made Amber the bloodsucker she is today but we’re Nicola is dark and possessive Amber is light and loving and will soon learned she really knows nothing about Nicola nor her life before. They met in the 70s, Nicola was already anexperienced vampire. She met Amber while she was out dancing at a club by herself. She explain to Nicola that all her husband Malcolm wanted to do was sit home read books and live as if he was 70. This is what Nicola would use to turn Amber. Throughout the book Amber learns all about Nicalas life and it seems everything Nicola told her about their fellow vampires staying away from them and not falling in love we’re all lies. She also knows that if she tryes to leave Nicola will hunt her down and kill her or at least that’s what she believed until she started meeting more people from Nicola’s past. I know I am probably doing a horrible job reviewing this book just know it is a book about two vampires were one wants to get away from the other but knows she cannot just pack her stuff and leave… OK that’s a horrible explanation also just know if you love paranormal stories with a great plot then you will definitely love the story Amber really is a person to route four as well as Courtney
The book goes from modern day to the 70s to the 1800s and back again and it’s also worth reading it really is an awesome story that I absolutely enjoyed. It is a vampire story not about the hunt but more about being a vampire it’s still wanting the life you want as opposed to the one someone else wants for you. This is a terrible review but a great book I loved it! #NetGalley, #BerkeleyPublishing, #RachelKollerCroft, #WeLoveTheNightlife,

Vampires who love the nightlife! I can't imagine a more exhausting immortal life. I can see the perks of it though with all the bodies available. We follow Amber who wants to leave her maker, Nicola. I found it a bit slow at the start but at the halfway point I was fascinated with how ruthless & truly evil some of the characters were. It was a great vampire book full of twists & betrayal.

Grrrl power! Usually vampire novels feature dark smoldering broody guys, but this one is about the girls who hunt the night. Imagine being trapped for eternity with someone you don't even like anymore, who will kill you if you try to leave, and you can't even ghost them because they can always find you. Vampires, toxic female friendships, disco - what's not to like?? This character driven story was part of my seasonal reading for the spooky season, recommended for readers who enjoy horror in general and vampires in particular.

The beginning of this one was so promising, but I felt like I got a little stuck in the middle waiting for something to really happen. The lead up took such a long time and while I got really into it in the last quarter, I would have liked a little more character development before that. I wanted to be more conflicted and attached to Nicola, but I never really felt like she was a character I was rooting for.

I do think this would make a really good movie or tv show because of the time jumps and the costume options.

One of the funnest books this year!
British. Hot. Vampires. Clubbing.
I loved the mix of timeframes explored here, the clash of new age vs. classic and the push and pull between maker and subordinate. This book was so much fun, action packed, and full of surprising twists.

This is an interesting way to write about toxic female friendships, but in paranormal setting since Amber and Nicole are vampires. I like that you see two points of view in the writing so that you can see Nicole ‘s view from before she’s been the vampire longer and Amber‘s since she’s been turned by Nicole . it’s really relationship between two women and how sometimes you feel suffocated by each other. It was intriguing and entertaining.

I was such a fan of Stone Cold Fox so I was surprised when I read the focus of this novel was vampires. But after reading it, I can say that the characters are vampires, it is really more about relationships. If you pick this up for the vampires, I think you will be disappointed, but if you pick it up for toxic women's relationship, you'll appreciate the complexity of the tale.

I liked the idea of a forced proximity in friendship fiction when the friendship should be over. I usually think of this as a romance trope but it worked.
Two strong women are at the center of this. Spread over fifty years. It is such a unique premise and that is hard to do in today's world where there are so many books coming out each week. It also does a good job of mashing up genres to appeal to a wide audience. It has a thriller aspect, women's fiction, and light horror for the vampires.

I liked the cat and mouse play between Nikola and Amber. I absolutely loved the disco and partying life setting. It didn't quite hit the must read mark for me, but it was a strong follow up to the author's debut novel and a fun romp through the disco era.

Amber is a fun-loving American living in London and Nicola is a broody vampire looking for a new companion when they bond over their love of disco in 1979. Fifty years later, Amber is tired of Nicola’s controlling behavior and carefully plotting her escape. WE LOVE THE NIGHTLIFE was a bloody good time—full of witty humor, dual POVs, a dangerous game of cat and mouse, and shocking twists that will blow your mind. A fresh take on vampires that explores the hold a toxic friendship can have on our lives.