The Deathless Girls by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Title: The Deathless Girls
Author: Kiran Millwood Hargrave
Genre/ issues: Gothic, feminist, rewriting classic fiction.

This is my current #TBR shelf. Yesterday I needed a new book to start and grabbed a couple to check out, and Tayla picked one for me based purely on the cover. And what a cracker of a book it was! So much so that I stayed up until about 2am finishing it.

The #BellatrixBooks project by Hachette provides leading female authors the opportunity to give voice to women of the past and present who have a million stories that are untold, mis-told or unheard. The Deathless Girls by Kiran Millwood Hargrave is the story of Dracula’s brides, relegated in Stoker’s novel to sensual stake fodder but depicted here as strong, complex and utterly fascinating. Not just a vampire story, this book examines class, race, family and destiny, and delves deeply into the questions of what you’d do for the ones you love. My only criticism (and it’s a minor one!) is that it feels a little brief – the pace of the novel is cracking, and there were a few points where I felt like a little expository monologueing could have been expanded into a chapter that I’d have loved to sink my teeth into (pun intended). I love it when a work read turns out to be also a really great holiday read!

#TamaraReads #2020readingchallenge 2/52

Happy reading,