katiewilkins186

Dracula in Love is basically the sub-conscious story told by the original. Instead of Dracula “possibly representing a fear of independent and sexually liberated women”, he is exactly that. And Mina has to decide if she wants the life she has always imagined for herself or if she’d rather be with Dracula. This book is her story, setting the record straight for those of us who have only read the story told by the men. This is a bit of a coming of age story and a lot of that is her sexual experience, so thing get pretty explicit at times. Never anything I found offensive though, except of course for some of the male characters incredibly Victorian views of women and sex.

This was by far the creepiest of all the dracula re-tellings I read and like Dracula: The Un-Dead it wasn’t at all what I expected. I expected a romance. What I got was a crazy hodgepodge that included a coming-of-age novel, a romance, border-line erotica, horror, paranormal elements, and a mystery. Sometimes it was a bit too much and I wished the book would make up its’ mind! The author also went a little overboard introducing mythologies. We got explanations of vampires as traditional vampires, saints, the Sidhe, and as a medieval cult. We do eventually get to the heart of things and it wasn’t too confusing, but again I think the book would have been better had the author just picked one thing to do. Finally, the ending, especially after Dracula: The Un-Dead, really disappointed me. This one wasn’t just depressing, it was needlessly depressing because of choices our protagonist made. Despite my other critiques, I think I could have liked this book much better otherwise. Depressing endings can really ruin a book for me and this one was no exception.

This review first published on Doing Dewey.