A fantastic epic, with surprising vampiric themes and immortal characters spanning centuries. I had no idea what would happen from one moment to the next and loved it. My only wish is that it was a little more focused, and I wanted to know more about the characters in the 80s, but over all this was SUCH a success.

I have picked this one up and put it down many times. I even tried buying the physical book to see if it was just a story I couldn't get through in digital form. I did read it completely, and there are a few things that I did appreciate from the author.
The writing was done well, and I did get immersed in the settings a few times. The characters were missing something for me, including Ana. I like the style of getting more of her history and understanding her choices, but I just couldn't connect to the characters. I can see the appeal and why this has so many great reviews; I have even recommended it to a few friends and a book club (they really enjoyed it), but this one wasn't for me.

Thank you NetGalley and publisher for the dARC for this work in exchange for my honest review.

I should have kept this one as a DNF. The writing is very beautiful but that's it. The plot was extremely boring. It was kind of just like following around this vampire in the most mundane of tasks. i was more invested in the present timeline than the past but even that didn't keep me motivated to continue reading. I wouldn't have been able to finish this without the audiobook, which was fine, but I wouldn't recommend picking up this book unfortunately. I'm not sure who I'd recommend this to.

This is the biggest let down of this year. If I could give it 0 stars I would.

I previously reviewed the audiobook edition of this novel but the facts remain the same: this was not a good book.

The moral dilemmas and ponderings of the MC are boring, and that is me being kind. There is nothing insightful about her thoughts, nothing unique really to her experience as a vampire. The writing is also extremely boring. Occasionally a boring story at least provides beautiful prose, but no this book manages to be horrendous the whole way through.

This title was overhyped and the worst thing I have read this year.

The vampire novel is dead; long live the vampire novel.

We are now sufficiently removed in time from the early aughts to round the perihelion and begin our inevitable return to the vampire, a monster that has practically become a metaphor of itself, rising again and again, never truly dead but always somewhat changed.

The tentative resurgence of vampire novels, this time with an intentional—even ostentatious—literary bent, is now well underway. Glossy, exclusive imprints have put out a judicious selection of vampire novels with complex themes. There was Woman, Eating (2022) by Claire Khoda and Reluctant Immortals by Gwendolyn Kiste (2022), and now The God of Endings by Jacqueline Holland. These are sumptuous, high-minded feasts, the narratives redolent with feeling and sensory delight that nod to Rice and her imitators but are ultimately more concerned with the philosophical over the pleasurable.

In media, there has been an equal emphasis on prestige with far less originality: the lush AMC adaptation of Interview with a Vampire as well as the less faithful (and less popular) adaptation of Let the Right One In. The PR surrounding the books, though, is carefully intellectual, emphasizing the their takes on gender, race, and other issues of cultural cachet and calling attention to their accomplished prose or narrative structure. I don’t disagree with any of these claims, but I do think it’s interesting how blatant the underlying message is: “Shelve these books among the contemporary or literary fiction! Not in the fantasy section, or god forbid, the YA section. Genre and teen girls, oh no!”

To be clear, I know the authors aren’t behind this, nor really, in the end, even the publishers. This is a larger cultural issue. But as with the Beatles, who were almost universally panned by US critics but screamed into stardom by teen girls, vampires owe their current cultural moment in part to that earlier unvarnished enthusiasm. Would more mature audiences be open to vampires in their literature if they hadn’t encountered Twilight (2005)?

Yes, I know we all want to be done with this conversation. The debate about sparkly, prudish vampires has been beaten to death, and yet here it comes, rising once more from the grave. I wouldn’t bring it up if I didn’t think the craze wasn’t still lurking in our collective subconscious, changing the way we think about vampires as both characters and metaphors.

Stephanie Meyer made vampires safe. Of course, she didn’t really—Edward is a creepy stalker and sex within a marriage established on the expectation of reproduction only served to underscore how dangerous childbirth is in America. But she made vampires’ sexuality safe, restrained it within the confines not just of marriage but of an eternal teenage tentativeness. Despite decades of life, wealth, power, and beauty, Edward is an awkward high schooler who just wants to play baseball and be allowed to date. It is Bella, the protagonist and would-be “victim,” who pursues him across the ocean, who insists on their union, who demands to be turned.

I’m not trying to valorize Twilight here—it remains a deeply problematic series. But this role reversal, and the feeling of safety necessary to enact it, are still playing out on the literary stage. Twilight asked us to consider both vampires without their quintessential sexuality and female characters who reject the victim/survivor dichotomy, neither Dracula’s passive Lucy nor the stake-toting Buffy Summers. It’s not a matter of destroying or being destroyed by the monster anymore. It’s about the victim-as-vampire; it’s about what the woman wants.

So what is that, once the characters are no longer teenagers? Art. Friendship. Art. Family. Art. That is, romance and/or marriage don’t even break the top five. Lydia of Woman, Eating wants to eat (duh), do performance art, and figure out her complicated relationship with her mother. Lucy of Reluctant Immortals wants to watch movies and chill with her bestie. Anna in The God of Endings wants to paint and run a preschool. They all want to reckon with their powers in a way that still allows them to do good in the world, and engage with things as immortal as they are—which is to say the enduring creative works that make a long life worth actually living.

The God of Endings is split into two alternating chronologies, one that begins in 1830s upstate New York and another that is set in roughly the same place but in 1984. From the outset, Anna has come full circle in a geographical sense, which underscores how much she also has not changed from an uncertain young girl to a floundering adult. This is the crux of the novel’s emotional concerns. In the earlier chronology, Anna ranges far from her home, making her way to and across Europe and the Mediterranean, slowly building up a series of lives only to lose them in devastating, often violent ways. In the later, Anna believes she has learned the lessons of grief and does her best not to become attached to anything, running an elite preschool so that she can interact with those who have neither the experience nor the capacity to be cruel (i.e., five- and six-year-olds).

But as any teacher will tell you, dealing with children means dealing with parents, and Anna is soon drawn into the disintegrating relationship between Katherine and Dave, the parents of her favorite student, Leo. Leo is already a gifted artist, and Anna, as a painter herself, wants to nurture his talent. But evidence of abuse begins to mount, and Anna isn’t sure she can remain aloof. Tormented by her need to care but also by her fear of loss, her hunger begins to rise.

Hunger and desire in vampire fiction usually find common ground in sexuality. But in this new crop of literary vampires, there is a certain prudishness at work in equal and opposite force to Twilight: instead of abstinent horniness, there’s a weary suspicion of (heterosexual) romantic love or desire. (Again, this is not a view that individual books are espousing. I am observing a trend.) In Reluctant Immortals, heroine Lucy eventually fights off her desire for Dracula and for a mortal man, and ends the novel proud of her singledom and strengthened by her network of female friends. In Woman, Eating, protagonist Lydia has a doomed affair with an engaged man, and does not end up with a romantic partner; instead, she chooses to run away with her mother. And The God of Endings?

The God of Endings is, if anything, anti-sexual. It’s not just in the 1984 “present day” sections; Anna is made a vampire as a child much like the tragic Claudia in Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire (1976). But in a sharp departure from Interview and its many imitators, Anna has no thwarted pubescence. There is no agonized sensuality to Anna’s coming of age, which happens in the cramped confines of steerage on a ship crossing the Atlantic. Instead of embracing, subverting, or controlling her sexuality, she jumps right from childhood to motherhood. She occupies a bunk near a mother and her two children, the elder of whom is a girl around her age named Mercy (a nod to Mercy Brown?). Over the course of the journey, Mercy goes from being her friend to her charge: when Mercy’s mother sickens and dies, Anna begins to take on the mothering duties of feeding, sheltering, and protecting Mercy and her baby brother Jonas. There is no hint of Carmilla (1872) in her affections.

This is also when we learn that being turned removed Anna’s sex characteristics. Instead of continuing the discomfiting tradition of Dracula and his children/brides, Anna’s “gift” erases any trace of her breasts and vagina. Anna is stunningly incurious about this change, as are most others. Neither her lover, Paul, nor her best friend, Anais, even remark on it, which may be exceedingly courteous, but is also fairly odd. Mostly it seems like Holland just isn’t interested in gender, which is fair enough, but that strange detail begs more questions than it answers.

If there is a response of sorts, it’s in The God of Ending’s meditation on motherhood. To be a parent, Holland implies, is absolutely not a matter of biology or “parts.” Anna cannot bear or nurse children, and this has zero bearing on her ability to nurture them; many of the parents she encounters throughout her long life have the supposedly requisite genitals but no willingness to care.

All of this marks the beginning of Anna’s journey, her first real interactions as a vampire. They will define her over the next century and a half of life, a life she cannot end no matter how much she wishes she could. Holland’s vampires are immune to all the traditional trappings: Anna has no vulnerability to garlic, silver, or even sunlight, and she cannot be killed. Ever. But she can feel pain just as she did when she was alive, physically and emotionally, and it is this factor that haunts her through the decades. This is a haunting that soon takes on personification in Czernobog, the titular god of endings, who may or may not be dogging her existence in order to periodically take away all that she has made for herself.

Is there such a force? Or is it only human wretchedness? Holland maintains a careful and effective ambiguity that succeeds in walking its line throughout the novel. The very fact of Anna’s own existence is proof of the supernatural, but as for greater and more ineffable powers, Anna cannot quite bring herself to believe. She has faith only that all things end—except, tragically, her own life.

The God of Endings is almost unbearably elegant: I sometimes had to stop and close the book in order to savor the near-overwhelming beauty of certain lines. Holland is a masterful writer whose insights are deeply felt. Her reflections on the turning of the seasons and Anna’s moments of peace are nearly portraits themselves, and her lingering sadness for the human condition is an ever-present undertone. She mourns the parade of cruelties she watches go by, and periodically escapes to the wilderness, where the beauty and brutality are straightforward, and have no moral dimension.

If anything, I was perhaps too convinced by Anna’s pessimism. After grieving so many losses alongside her, from the early loss of her father and first love to the later, more abstract losses of her home, her hope, and her innocence, I began to share her outlook. Humans have such an extensive array of cruelties available to them, and Holland is unstinting in her examination not just of violence, but of the selfishness, indifference, and willful stupidity that enable most violent ends. Anna’s poignant but largely unsuccessful attempts to save others—or even herself—from suffering still left me hoping that she would find some measure of comfort, but her transformation in the final chapters left me more apprehensive for her future pain than confident in her newfound hope.

Part of this was not so much the emotional shift, which Holland had been building quite skillfully, but my deep ambivalence about the ending. Holland spends the entire book establishing what a poor mother Katherine is, and a fairly rotten person to boot. She’s a pathological liar who manipulates everyone around her, and her self-obsession leads to her neglect, endangerment, and traumatization of Leo. Anna has watched scenes like this play out over and over again. She—and we the readers—want her to act where human powers fail.

The ending is brutal in a very unique and shockingly bloodless way. Yes, bloodless. There need not be gore for there to be brutality, and Holland has found a way to shock in a totally new manner for a vampire novel: via inaction rather than action. In an accident of timing, Anna discovers Katherine unconscious and clearly overdosing. She also finds Katherine’s suicide note, which is addressed only to Dave and makes no mention of Leo (let alone offering her only surviving son a farewell or kind word). Coldly enraged by this final proof of indifference, Anna leaves her to die. I felt Anna’s refusal to aid Katherine more searingly than the action sequences in several other horror novels combined.

Her decision is quite fitting, but also leaves a queasy moral ambiguity in its wake. Which is good—I like moral complexity. I fully admit that I would have had less trouble with the ending if Anna had killed Katherine outright, which says a lot about our culture of action-hero justice. Could Anna have snatched Leo, drained Katherine, and fled into the night? Sure, but here instead we have Anna choosing to simply allow someone to experience the consequences of their actions. I’m not talking about drug use—Holland is careful throughout not to equate addiction itself with moral failing—but about Katherine’s abdication of responsibility for her child. Just as Katherine refuses to act, so Anna refuses. And just as Katherine acts in her own self-interest, so Anna acts—in Leo’s interest, but also ultimately in her own.

All of this would be a far more straightforward tale of responsibility (or lack thereof) except for one thing: at no point is Leo given a choice to accept or reject vampirism. It’s true that the choice might be largely symbolic, since a six-year-old probably could not grasp the full implications of immortal existence. It’s also true that adults sometimes have to make decisions for children that the children may not like—removing them from unfit parents certainly happens in more cases than this. But Anna is tormented through the book by her own lack of choice, and says repeatedly that she would have preferred to die. She knew it as a child and confirmed it as an adult. And then she turns around and makes that choice for Leo.

This makes for a quietly subversive ending, one that has more questions than answers about the natures of parenting and existence. Is Anna’s final act of the novel one of optimism or folly, selfishness or generosity? All signs point toward hope, at least, with Anna awaiting her chance to do better by Leo than was done for her, to move ever closer to family and community and art. But vampires are defiant creatures, never content to remain in the categories for which they were intended, and in The God of Endings they still assert a subtle horror. Anna has gotten her new beginning, but to Leo, she is the avatar of endings.

A reluctant vampire grapples with age-old questions about life and death, good and evil and humanity itself in The God of Endings, Jacqueline Holland's striking debut novel. Beginning with her conversion from dying young girl to immortal vampire in 1830s New York State, the story presents alternating chapters of past and present that follow Anna across the Atlantic to Europe and back again to the United States. In Eastern Europe, she learns about Czernobog, the god of endings, whose scent of smoke pursues her, warning her each time he appears to wrench away any goodness she's managed to claim for herself. She also learns about prejudice and humanity's expansive capacity for evil. Back in the home where she was reborn as a vampire, Anna--now known as Collette--runs an art school for young children and tries to ignore the disorder in her life as Czernobog seems to be closing in again; at the same time, a deepening relationship with one of her students has her questioning her long-held beliefs.

Holland's novel captures the existential angst of an immortal creature who aches for release from a world filled with endings and death. Past and present unfurl together, elegantly raising the stakes in parallel with each other as the novel climbs its way to a satisfying climax. Gorgeously told, The God of Endings offers a thought-provoking and empathy-evoking take on vampire stories.

The God of Endings is a stunning debut novel that explores the intricacies of love, family, history, and myth through the eyes of an immortal woman. Colette LeSange, the protagonist, is a complex and multi-dimensional character who has endured centuries of turmoil and heartache, making her a relatable and compelling protagonist.

Author Jacqueline Holland's writing is both beautiful and haunting, weaving together a story that is at once suspenseful and enchanting. The novel's themes of immortality, identity, and the human condition are explored with great depth and sensitivity, creating a powerful meditation on what it means to be alive.

The characters in The God of Endings are richly drawn and fully realized, adding to the novel's emotional depth and complexity. From Colette's troubled past to the arrival of a gifted child at her fine arts school, Holland expertly weaves together multiple storylines, creating a tapestry of lives that is both compelling and thought-provoking.

What struck me most about The God of Endings was its exploration of the fundamental question of whether life is a gift or a curse. Through Colette's experiences, Holland offers a powerful meditation on the meaning of life and the nature of existence, leaving the reader with much to ponder.

Overall, The God of Endings is a masterful work of literary fiction that is both beautiful and haunting. Holland's writing is poetic and nuanced, creating a story that is at once suspenseful, enchanting, and deeply moving. This is a novel that will stay with readers long after they've turned the final page, and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys thought-provoking and emotionally resonant fiction.

⭐️Overall rating: 3.5/5
📒Notes: Thank you Netgalley for the chance to review. I took my time with this review because I expected more than this book could give. For this to have been 5 stars, it needed to fully address the intersectionality of a vampire living as a woman through a time when slavery and colonization still exist and the world is expanding and changing.

The attempt was made, but in a single stroke of color. Art felt more prevalent and was the best done. Our main character chose to sit out the historic events of her time by focusing on painting. Valid decision honestly, if not a missed opportunity for a written book.
There is inclusion of diversity, but not in the way that is helpful to the plot or breaks stereotypes. Most die too. We're dealing with immortality, but it's so common in side characters of colors to die. So it reads like an old trope. There's representation of aexuality, again a nice touch. The side characters in touch with their brand of sexuality (who also tended to die) at times read like a subliminal message echoing an old trope; virginity=pure=survival. I wouldn't change the MC sexuality, but I'd have liked to see some happiness for other characters to avoid repeating, even if inadvertently, this old trope in the writing.

There is so much depth despite my noted complaints. Others should read this and search for that intersectionality and formulate their own opinion on if the author succeeded in the mission to tell a story of human compassion surviving immortality that accurately reflects the times and layers of her existence

(I received an eARC from Flatiron Books and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review)
This is now a new favorite!
Anna/Anya/Collette is our main character and we experience her younger, human years in the 1830s rural New York with her. But after a series of tragedies, she's unwillingly turned into a vampire, a real reluctant immortal. All she wants to do is live in the woods and do art, but these pesky humans keep showing up and it always ends up breaking her heart, for Czernobog, the god of endings, will always be following Anna from the shadows.
This book, like many historical fiction novels, has a dual timeline and the other timeline is following Anna, now going by Collette, in the 'present' of 1984 where she's back in upstate New York running an elite French style kindergarten where she teaches little kids art. A vampire kindergarten teacher -- everything I never knew I wanted.
I will be reading whatever Holland writes next!

This a novel you take your time reading. It is a very dark story which you cannot put down. It is a novel based on dark folklores , Grimm’s and mythologies especially in Eastern Europe. The main one that keeps popping up is Czernobog, the Holland’s mystic as referenced to God of Endings. He keeps haunting the main character, Anna ( she had different names throughout the years) after her rebirth as a vampire.
This is is a story of a young protagonist starting back in 1830’s before she was turned to present. it goes back and forth to her past and present as she struggles with her her immortality and the morality of life. You can look at it as her history.
This isn’t nothing like An Interview with a Vampire. This is a struggle for Anna trying to moral choices for herself or not. She becomes too attached to one of the students which is causing her to reflect back on her life. As she sees, hears, and smells the God Of Endings, she believes she’s losing herself as she struggles to understand the meanings.
I understand the author’s goals in writing her debut, I had struggled to connect any of the characters including Anna. That was my disappointment along with how it ended. The author Holland tied up most of everything at the end. I just felt there were couple of things which were left off uncompleted. That’s how it felt to me. I’m still debating after completing this book a month ago either a three and half or four stars still.
I have received a physical ARC from Flatiron and an eBook from Flatiron and Netgalley. Thank you so much!
As usual, all my reviews are my own opinions without any influence from any publisher.

The God of Endings by Jacqueline Holland

What a gorgeously written novel. Somehow it manages to feel like a modern AND classic take on the vampire novel. The prose felt lush and powerful.

We follow Collette through her youth to the moment she was turned by her grandfather, and the life she forged for herself from there. The novel is predominantly set in 1984, where she has a small school that specializes in fine arts for the elite in New York. There’s a special student who comes in and I loved Collette’s fierce protectiveness of him. I was so anxious to see what happened to this lovely boy. Holland weaves the story deftly and layered what was really going on behind the scenes so expertly, I was unsure of what was really happening until she revealed it. The God of Endings has many stories to tell within this one story, and they all come together to be told in such a devastatingly beautiful way. This is a deeply intellectual novel and not the watered down versions of vampires we have become used to. This is the vampire story as it was meant to be told.

I was gifted audio from @macmillan.audio and an ebook from @flatiron_books in exchange for an honest review. Narrator Saskia Maarleveld captivates through Collette’s voice and I found they had a soothing way of speaking that exuded through to their performance.

If you like invisible life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab - Vampire in society. Can a being such as vampire that live of the blood and has urge to kill for food be a good being? Can mind power overpower natural urges? And if it can how long? If you don't know somones past can you juge them, but we all do ? Amazing story about nature vs nuture and society accepting it or not.

I have struggled with this book review for a while now. Never has a book touched me like this. It’s a love hate. I feel like it should be read by high school or college literature classes. This is unlike anything I’ve read. I love any kind of vampire tale. But after this, I no longer want to be one lol. It’s a serious book. Collette had no choice. She had died from an illness when very young and was turned. After growing up, she runs a preschool from her home. She is older than I don’t know what. I couldn’t get enough of this book but all the time thought I’m not even half way?! It’s so long. At times it became tedious. I think if it had been half the length it would be 5 stars. Because we were looking at her life and alternating each chapter between the present and her past. She lived through wars and watched people she loved grow old and die. After the second half it was so depressing I had to read something else. Make sure you’re in the mood for this. It’s very poetic. But the part that became horror was something if I’d known I wouldn’t have read it. Little warning: animal cruelty. But I can see how if it were real life, it would happen. There was also a shocking part. That really threw cold water on my sexy vampire wannabe. It really makes you think. Also, if I’d known how it ended, I wouldn’t have read it. I DO like the decision she made, but what happened to cause it was something I don’t like to read about. I work in a hospital and see enough sadness and death. No one wants to see it like this. There’s one person in the book I wish she would’ve killed slowly. I’ll let you decide which one. But after it was such a long book and had such a buildup, it pretty much just ended in a chapter that was quick and a pretty much flat ending. I was like, ‘That’s all?!’ And to happen on Christmas! Not sure if this will have a second book after this. But the main thing and also the reason for the title, we never really saw. The mythical part about it. I get the meaning of what she learned and that makes sense. But seems like that all fell away fast. I just wish it would’ve been more dramatic. I’d also like to read about the life she was choosing at the end. To hear more about others like her that we met.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher/author

I was unable to get situated into this book and story and it ended up being a DNF for me. I think others will really dig this, but it ended up not being my cup of tea.

I was really looking forward to reading this book, but unfortunately it fell short of my expectations and I do think that is more on me than the author because the story I got was different than the one I was expecting. The story started out promising but it really slowed way down, and it never really picked back up. Some of the characters were really underdeveloped and almost uninteresting after we met them because we didn't really get to spend time with them. And considering how far into the FMCs inner monologue we go I'm surprised the author didn't elaborate on some of the characters more.
Again my biggest gripe was the pacing, I was 60% and I felt like literally nothing was happening, maybe because the author is over descriptive? Her story and I just did not mesh. For a "vampire and horror" book it was actually surprisingly bloodless and gutless. Definitely more of a historical novel than anything else. I can see why some people enjoy it but again it was not for me.

Thank you Flatiron Books for the ARC.

Hooray for a truly original spin on the vampire novel!

I love vampire stories where instead of becoming a blood sucking robot, people who are turned retain their original personality and have to figure out how to deal with their new, um, immortality and feeding habits. This is a terrific spin on that trope, with a lovely and lovable protagonist who is probably the first ever….vampire preschool teacher!

This is definitely a slow burn read, so fair warning. It’s also less creepy and atmospheric than a lot of the best vampire stories, but because this is more character study than horror novel, the pacing and style make sense.

It’s an interesting dual timeline structure, going back and forth between the present and Collette’s history since she was turned. The modern timeline can get irritating at times (the family with whom our teacher gets over involved with is a bit tropey), but the bones of the plot are good, and produce a satisfying ending.

The God of Endings is long on inner monologue and short on action, but I thought it worked well for this truly original twist on the gentleman (or in this case, gentlewoman!) vampire.

Finally a vampire story with no shiny dudes or fake high schools scenes! I really liked how it captured the vampire fever of late 1800s where people forced others to cremate their loved ones or rip their hearts off before burying them because they for some reason decided to exhume bodies and saw signs of struggle (they had a tendency to bury people before they actually died and imagine waking up in a coffin). It later moved into witch hunts and blaming older women who live alone away from the villages for all their misfortunes. I liked how back story was anchored by historical events.

Collette (or Anna or Anya) lost her parents and her brother to consumption and she was about to die of it herself. Though her grandfather had different plans for her. She woke up as someone who would bloom but not wither. Life after that was all about learning how to control her urges and figure out ways to survive. After many experience ps that she preferred to forget, she settled in her grandfather’s house in the US to run a private kindergarten for privileged kids. All was under control until she found herself too much into one student’s life and at the same time her biggest fear was catching up with her.

It was going so strong and I was so excited to find another 5 star book. But I really need an explanation for the god of endings. It might be me being thick when I read that part, but I thought ending was cut too short to really understand what or who was the god of endings. I might read this book again after few years to see if I would form a better opinion, but still I highly recommend this book

Collette LaSange is a vampire. Her story alternates between Collette's 19th century origins and present-day 1984, where she runs an elite preschool in upstate New York. Collette has a stable and pleasant life teaching her students, but all seems to change when her hunger for blood increases without warning and one of her student's unstable home life begins to intrude on Collette.

This is an unusual vampire novel that's light on blood-sucking and heavy on introspection and incorporeal forces. (The sort of vampirism is cleared up very early on when we learn that a female vampire's human genitalia ceases to exist upon their transformation…! I still don't know what to think about this.) A key conflict, again and again, is the question of life being worth living, and its an revealing contrast to the setting of a peaceful children's school or a French village overrun by German soldiers. The main villain, if there is one, is Czernobog, the titular God of Endings, who seemingly haunts Collette.

It's an interesting set-up and addition to the canon of vampire books, but there were several aspects that lessened my enjoyment. The early sections of Collette's life are meandering and overpower the present day scenes. Collette's increased blood appetite has no apparent cause, and she sakes hew new thirst in both dangerous and stupid ways (seriously lady, get a goat or something) . She somehow forgets to ask someone who might know about the change. I was waiting for most of the book to learn more, so the dangling thread made me grumpy.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed the novelty of the book and the deep emotions portrayed despite the lack of satisfaction — it might be the first book that could be categorized as pastoral vampirism. Recommended for readers interested in a different take.

A beautiful reflection on life and relationships, told over the span of decades from the point of view of a woman who cannot die. I really enjoyed some of the tender and heartbreaking interactions and character relationships within this story.

Half of the story follows Anna from the time that she in a child and her past, growing up, living through important times in history, coming to understand herself and humanity. The other half follows a short timeline of Anna, now in 1984, as a teacher/caretaker who operates her own elite, private preschool. There was a lot more focus on preschoolers and teaching than I would have thought going into it, which I found distracting from the story, but still really loved the developing affection Anna experienced for little Leo.

A very interesting, unique look at vampires.

I did not expect to like a vampire book this much. It did not feel campy or kitchy or any of the other things I was worried about. Rather, I could not look away. The writing was absolutely exquisite and put me in a bit of a trance. This is brilliant as that is exactly what "vampires" do. I can't recommend this more.