Absolutely fangtastic! The prose, humor throughout the book and characters you just fall in love with! A unique remaster of Dracula, powerful females whose timeless beauty is in more than their looks!! 10/10 recommend.

I’m such a fan of Kiersten White’s YA books and I enjoyed Hide too, so Lucy Undying was really exciting to me because I know White is good at giving a voice to a sidelined female character in a classic book (see The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein). I’ve never read Dracula and knew basically nothing about Lucy Westenra so I can’t speak to whether this book kept the true spirit of its inspiration.

I did enjoy the book overall and White’s writing shines at points, especially with Lucy’s diary entries. Unfortunately, I do think this book suffers from slow pacing and it doesn’t fully immerse us in the mind of its titular character, Lucy, since half of it takes place in the modern world from someone else’s perspective.

Lucy’s diary entries and learning about her past was much more interesting to me than following Iris in the modern day, so I wasn’t invested in half of the book. Iris’s chapters could be a slog to get through but I did enjoy the parallels of her story to Lucy and how she held up a mirror to Lucy’s life. I didn’t buy into their romance but I did buy that they had a connection that Lucy had been seeking from other people her entire life.

Lucy herself is an interesting character and we see who she was as a human and afterwards, when she becomes a vampire. Her deep loneliness in both eras of her life touched me and her longing for love, unconditional and true love, resonated. White is great at writing complex women but I wish we had more time between seeing what Lucy presented herself as and who she truly was. Some of her relationships with other women, while interesting, were also very short and I wanted to be more invested in them. If we hadn’t spent time on Iris, I definitely think these relationships would’ve been more fleshed out.

The plot of the modern storyline, while clever, doesn’t truly add to what I loved about Lucy and felt like it belonged in a completely different book. I think it’s fine to have half of the book set in modern times but that isn’t its main draw and the villains weren’t strong enough to pull it off.

Overall, Lucy Undying is an interesting homage to the original work but feels disjointed at times because of its other protagonist and the modern setting of half of the book.

Thanks to NetGalley and Del Rey for an ARC in exchange for my honest review!

This review will be published on my blog (clearsummers.wordpress.com) and Goodreads on August 27, 2024. It will be published on Amazon on the pub date.

Lucy Undying was a unique story revolving around our Lucy from the original Dracula and Iris who is a victim to the Goldaming life and her mother's abuse. This story was told in a unique way revealing Lucy's past and her present day happenings with Iris. There are also chapters in which Lucy is talking to her therapist and reveals all her past and sometimes present troubles. Honestly, fans of the original Dracula might not love this book. Everyone except Lucy from the original story is a villian (and the cowboy, he's a sweetheart and I loved him). Of course Mina is a huge presence in the book as she was Lucy's friend but her true character in this book will leave original Dracula fans in shock. I personally enjoyed this book and its uniqueness and the author's portrayal of grief and abuse and how the characters overcome it and find themselves. But...As much carnage as there is and as many vampires are involved it didn't give me the gothic vibes I was wishing for. It ultimately is a love story. This book is going to be an absolute hit for some readers, some will appreciate it for it's originality and uniqueness but others are going to struggle with this one. It was certainly a wild ride and I did enjoy the different POV's and diary entries from before Lucy was turned into one of Dracula's vampires.

Thank you to NetGalley and Del Rey for the ARC of this book!

Lucy Undying takes the story of Dracula's victim Lucy Westenra and makes her the center of this tale that spans decades. We learn about Lucy through her journals, which are being read in modern day by Iris. She is immediately enraptured by Lucy and ho she had to hid her real self from the world. Lucy gave herself to Dracula to save her love, Mina, but we find out there was actually more to Lucy's untimely death than meets the eye. Gothic, fantasy, sapphic romance, self-discovery, friendship, and revenge all play major parts in this fresh take on Dracula and vampires. Has elements that remind me of Blade and House of Usher.

“Stories are hauntings, aren’t they? The ghosts we carry with us everywhere. I’ll try to tell you my stories in order. Build a house for you where all my ghosts can be contained and haunt you in a way you can make sense of.”

“If my heart beat, it would beat your name.”

I’ve always loved vampires, especially Dracula! I watched the movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a kid and was immediately drawn to it. It was dark, gothic, sensual, romantic- everything I still love! Lucy Undying gives us the story of one Dracula’s brides. Poor Lucy was young and naive and wanted love so badly. In Lucy Undying we are given glimpses into Lucy’s past and present. We watch her unrequited love for her governess in life and death, and her searching the world for meaning. She wants to find Dracula and meets other brides along the way, bonded by blood and loneliness. In present day she finds Iris, someone to love and an ally in her journey of self discovery and revenge. Iris is a mirror to Lucy, reflecting back the intense want for freedom and peace. I LOVED this book. Lucy and Iris both pulled at my heart strings and I loved the twists and turns their story took. I was riveted from the first journal entry. Lovely writing and really creative writing. Loved that Lucy got her own story and found love!

vibes: Dracula but with a closer look at the sapphic parts, sometimes women just need to kill people, parallel narratives

Heat Index: 2/10

Lucy Westenra was famously a victim... But what if she actually did go on to "live" as a vampire throughout the centuries? She's been trying to evade her maker ever since her first death, which leads her to Iris in the twenty-first century. Iris has her own past she's trying to escape, and she and Lucy find a commonality in one another... and love. Yet neither of them are truly free, and without defeating those coming after them, they can never truly be together. A little easier said than done when one of those threats is... Dracula.

I was really excited about this one--that cover! Dracula! Sapphic vampire romance! And it's... a book I'd recommend to a certain audience, yes. Namely people who really enjoy retellings of gothic tales with a flipped lens, queer retellings especially. Yet, I don't think it reached as far as it could have.

There are several different primary narratives here (though they aren't quite the only perspectives you'll have). You have Lucy's diary from her human life, Lucy telling her story to a therapist, and Iris's much more straightforward twenty-first century point of view. Personally, I thought the diary entries were really interesting and indeed pretty tragic. Lucy's therapy sessions are both a cool tribute to Interview with the Vampire (or so they read to me) and like.. genuinely funny. I like her. I like Vanessa, the therapist. They're the kind of unhinged I believe Lucy, with everything she's been through, would be.

Then you have Iris.

So like--this book is in many ways a romance. Specifically the romance between Lucy and Iris. Obviously, I, as a romance reader, am so down for this. And I'm glad that White gave Iris a POV, as it can be so difficult to write a romance through only one POV.

The issue is that Iris isn't super interesting. In theory, her story should be--there's a lot of work done, and it's the kind of darkly comedic take with a decent amount of commentary on twenty-first century life that I would normally be down for. But Iris... just doesn't have a great voice? And her romance with Lucy is very instalove.

Instalove can be sold (controversial take, I know) but when you have the story splintered in so many different directions, you really can't settle into it. Because yeah--we get Lucy's POV, but much more so in the past, or in tellings of what she did in the past. Not so much when she's with Iris. Lucy is a compelling person, I just didn't really get why she was so into Iris.

Also, Iris really does seem to only exist in relation to Lucy, at points. In the sense that she's there to make sure we're interpreting everything else correctly. There's a whole section where she sort of summarizes reading Lucy's diary, and tells the audience everything we should take from them, basically? And I was like--cool, I did get all of those things when I read them. It was a bizarre moment, in a book that I would say is overall pretty well-written otherwise.

Some people won't like the humorous tone. I personally did. By and large, besides moments like the above in Iris's sections, I think the writing is pretty solid. There are some pretty turns of phrase, and a clear love for the gothic. I didn't agree with some of the takes on certain Dracula characters... both from a Dracula perspective, and a "sapphic retelling" perspective.

Like, this book is interesting, for the most part. And I don't think it's bad, per se. But it's definitely not everything it could've been.

The Sex:

The sex is by and large off the page or briefly summarized. Honestly, I kind of felt like the Kiersten White YA books I read way back in the day were... more explicit? I don't know. Kind of wanted more from a sapphic vampire romance, though of course that's all up to her and valid and so on. I just would've Liked To See It. Might've added some more bite (get it) to the story.

Overall--I'd say that this will be right for some readers. And I feel like I should've been among them? It just didn't quite work for me.

Thanks to NetGalley and Del Rey for providing me with a copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

I like Kiersten White's retellings of Camelot and Frankenstein, and I enjoyed this one too. I would have liked more of Count Dracula in this one, but conversely, people who haven't read Dracula can probably still understand it. The original Dracula is an epistolary novel, and Lucy Undying is an epistolary novel in a modern format: told in letters and diary entries but also therapy session transcripts. This is a re-imagining of Lucy Westenra, a character from Dracula who is "innocent and virginal," with 3 suitors, before becoming a ravenous vampire. The original Lucy preys on children as a vampire, and many critics call her an example of the Victorian "angel/w***e" dichotomy. So, I liked how in White's re-imagining, Lucy says preying on children is taboo even among vampires. The cult was interesting. So were the explorations of Lucy's sexual attraction to Mina, which is present even in the original.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review!

As a huge Dracula and vampire enthusiast, this book had so much promise but fell so short.

First, the change of POVs and timelines was very confusing and hard to keep track of. Iris POV was always so dull and it dragged, making it so much harder for me to keep reading.

I can understand the twist the author was trying to give to this Dracula retelling but it just didn't work for me. A vampire MLM?

I really do appreciate that the author wanted to give Lucy a story since almost almost all of the books, movies and shows reduce Lucy to just Mina's best friend with absolutely no depth but this book missed the mark.

Goodreads review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6445259751?book_show_action=false

Fable Review: https://fable.co/review/4eafffd9-a39d-4fcc-ba7f-4d073a049228/share

Thank you to Random House and Netgalley for this e-arc in exchange for an honest review!

I feel very conflicted about Lucy Undying. The ideological framework of the piece has so much promise: White reimagines Dracula’s Lucy Westenra as a closeted queer woman in love with her governess, Mina. The narrative follows Lucy, and the modern heir to her fortune, Iris, from three perspectives: Lucy’s girlhood journal, a patient transcript of vampire Lucy’s therapy sessions, and Iris’ first-person narration of life as heir to the Goldaming fortune. It very much has the vibes of a modern sapphic Jane Eyre.

Both to its advantage and disadvantage, this novel has a lot going on. There are so many plots and subplots and side plots that it's hard to stay continually engaged because it feels like you’re reading multiple books at once. This also made pacing an issue for me: at about 25%, the novel turns into a teen romance, then at 50% we go back to the great vampire stuff, and then it feels like a new book entirely because we travel back to America to take down Iris’ mom’s MLM that has felt like a ghost throughout the novel. In my opinion, this book should’ve either had 200 pages cut out or have been made into a series. There is some really good vampire lore and world-building but it’s completely overshadowed by narrative fluff.

I think if I were more into sapphic novels I would’ve really enjoyed this novel. But it’s so much more romance than vampirism when I expected the scales to be weighted the opposite direction. For the right audience, this novel will be really good.

--This review will be posted to Goodreads today (5/10/24) and to my Instagram (either via stories or main feed post) the week of 5/13/24.--

Not only did this book have a beautiful cover that draws you in, but it also had an interesting description that drew me in. Sadly, I got about 66% through the book before I decided to DNF it. If there hadn't been a power outage, I probably wouldn't have read as much as I did. Not only did I struggle with this book being in first person, but because there were several povs it made it more confusing. There were also times that the main character sounded immature.

Thank you to @delreybooks for sending me an arc of Lucy Undying by Kiersten White!

I finished this behemoth 112 chapter book in two days. It held my attention and would not let me go. The characters, the different perspectives blew my mind, I found myself wishing for a physical copy because there were so many lines that reminded me of the first time I read Dracula & let me tell you the female friendships in this book had me giggling and kicking my feet. I loved Lucy and Iris so much that this book now rivals how much I adore A Dowry of Blood and an Education in Malice and I highly HIGHLY reccomend that you add it to your TBR.

Lucy Undying releases September 10th!

I've never read Dracula & I wonder if my rating would be higher if I had. I almost stopped reading after the armistice scene because it was just too over the top cringy but I pushed on. Later in the book it also started to feel like there was too much going on - that the story of Lucy's life could have been an entirely separate novel and I would have loved it. A lot of the time when books utilize multiple perspectives (especially when one is 130 years older than the rest) it gets confusing but White managed to make each character feel like an individual with their own voice. Though there were some elements I disliked, at the end of the day, I'm still just a huge fan of Sapphic romance, mommy issues and Kiersten White.

It sorrows me to give this review because I love a great many of Kiersten White's books. But while Lucy Undying has an interesting and ambitious premise, it falls well short of this goal. The book is somewhat of a Dracula telling, spanning the time during the original novel and after into the future. The story is broken up into different jarring perspectives, the diary of Lucy, a transcript with a therapist, and the main character Iris. This is at least partly done for a reveal that is both obvious and annoying since it does not add to the plot and makes it unnecessarily obtuse. The heart of the story and its characters gets lost in the mechanics of the story and while I pushed through to the end, I could have stopped well before the halfway point and been okay with never continuing. There are bits and pieces of greatness, but would have to be recrafted into a different package for the delivery to be more smooth and gripping. While I could appreciate what she was attempting to do ultimately, I found that by then I didn't really care. Overall, a huge disappointment.

This book felt too juvenile to me. The first person point of view definitely is part of the problem for me. However, there are other aspects of this book that did not work for me. It almost feels as if the author is trying too hard to be relatable or funny. Like, they’re not a regular mom, they’re a cool mom. In the first chapter, a character named Dick Cox and an ode to coffee almost feels like it’s trying to shove the humor in my face. And it’s millennial humor at that. A lot of the writing also feels stilted. “Fie! A curse on my earlier hopes. Author Hollywood and his flesh-colored mustache are coming instead. He sent a card asking to call on us this afternoon. I forgot he existed until he insisted on reminding me.” Apart from the first exclamatory, which didn’t make much sense to me, a lot of the sentences just feel the same. Many things in the book just don’t make sense. What is a “flesh-colored mustache”. Why is “butter chicken” used as a pet name NUMEROUS times throughout the book? One set of sentences early on in the book are “Breasts really are fantastic. I mean, just the best. Absolutely divine. I could live for a thousand more years and never tire of them” which is just really off putting, especially so early in a book. It was hard for me to continue with this book, so I will be DNFing.

However, I have seen through reviews that a lot of people thoroughly enjoyed this book! I would not base your decision to read only on my review. What doesn’t work for me may work for you! I really liked how the book was written through diary entries and different point of views. This book also has an AMAZING cover!

Please note any quote I used is a part of an ARC, so it is unfinished and may be edited or removed. However, I will not be publishing this review as I do not review DNFs.

Thank you so much for ARC!

I loved Dracula so reading from one of his wives' pov. This is another book to add for my spooky season list!

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC!
The ideas at play here are so darn cool and as a long time Dracula fangirl I ate this book up. The writing and styling of the narrative weren’t exactly my cup of tea so docking stars based on that. But I enjoyed the elements of the story and the authors creativity in creating something so fresh and new from a classic.

All I have to say is that I knew it! I knew there had to be more to Lucy Westenra than Bram Stoker gave us in Dracula. This saphhic horror novel tells the story from three view points. We follow Lucy in the future, the past (via her diary) and from Iris Goldaming. Does that surname sound familiar? I've always been a Dracula girl, but now I realize he was just a bit player in something much larger! There are secrets, twists, a love story for the ages, and a shocking surprise visit that I was not expecting! This is a book that is going to be living rent-free in my head for quite a while!

A truly weird experience. I expected something different from this book. The multiple POVs weren't my favorite choice. I usually struggle with this author's books, which is a shame, because the ideas are great.

This book was pretty good. But I was not a huge fan of all of the points of view. The writing was not really for me. But I think other people would like it.

Lucy Undaying: A Dracula Novel by Kiersten White

Summary:
Lucy Westenra, an early victim of Dracula, found her end only to rise again, reborn as a perpetual resident of the vampire's realm. Through the ages, she sought purpose and identity, forever entwined in the shadows of her immortal tormentor. In modern-day London, Lucy's existence takes an unexpected turn as she crosses paths with Iris, trapped in her own family of deceit and power. United by a shared longing to break free from their haunting pasts, Lucy and Iris were drawn together. Their blossoming romance faces formidable challenges. Confronted with the past and the looming threat of Dracula, Lucy is at a crossroads between her love of Iris and hunting her maker, Dracula.

Review:
Let me start by saying this is a huge cult classic from my teenage years. I was obsessed with Bram Stroke's Dracula movie. I loved the love story between Dracula and Mina. So when I saw this book, the cover is hauntingly gorgeous; I was excited to read the point of view from Lucy. Lucy is a bird trapped in a cage. She is pressured to live by high society's social norms and her purpose of marriage to her demise. The character of Lucy is well-written and explores the innocence of a young woman thrust into a world she has to try to navigate. Her innocence allows her to be taken advantage of in multiple ways and end up in precarious situations. She meets other vampires along the way and learns more about herself. Lucy has a forlorn connection to the mortal world. The themes of self-discovery and found family are written throughout the book. The storyline creates an exciting journey for Lucy, and you experience her vampirism.

I was engaged throughout the entire book. There were no dull moments. Lucy's story takes place in multiple places and times. The themes of self-discovery and found family are written throughout the book. The storyline creates an exciting journey for Lucy, and you experience her vampirism. The story is told through dated journal entries and multiple POVs, but they are very easy to follow. The author did a great job exploring how society demonizes young women who do not fit the mold. Human, Lucy loses her autonomy from the men in her life and is seen as a possession more than a person. I loved this book and could not put it down. It was a fantastic adaption to Dracula's story.

In exchange for my honest review, I received an ARC copy of the ebook from Netgalley and Random House Publishing Group. Thank you for the opportunity.