The God of Endings is lyrically written a unique Vampire story blending with historical fiction.The two time lines adds so much to the story I was drawn in and fascinated throughout.#netgalley #flatiron

This book pulled off a difficult feat of being a literary character study, a horror novel, a work of historical fiction, a suspenseful mystery/thriller, and a fantasy novel with consistent world-building. Not to mention the beauty of the relationship at the heart of the work between Anna and Leo. I was never sure what to expect next with this book, and the character of Anna was built so skillfully and realistically. This book was heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful, but not in a saccharine way. I felt that the ending was very satisfying and well-earned. I would love to read a sequel to this work! I found myself remaining curious about Anna's grandfather and other characters, and interested to see how Leo would adjust to his new life. This book also presented a really compelling meditation on the purposes of art and the life of artists. I thought that the pacing was masterfully done, and all of the relationships felt real and serious. Overall I enjoyed this book quite a bit and I am eager to read anything else from this author.

To be honest, I approached this book with a little bit of weariness. I just feel like there have been a lot of stories about vampires who hate being vampires and never want to feed on humans, and I don’t know, I just miss the campy fun of vampire books. God of Endings is very existential about living forever, and needing to feed on people to do so, and I definitely felt like it didn’t have that much new things to say on the matter. However, it is such a well-crafted book, I was still riveted by it. All the compliments to Holland, for making a book with a hook that I didn’t find all that exciting brim with urgency. She’s such a good storyteller, and God of Endings is so tightly paced, I found myself reading it over a couple of days even at a time when I’m struggling with reading. I can’t wait to see what she does next.

Collette LeSange is a vampire. She has lived for centuries. She has seen and felt pain that others can never imagine. Currently, she leads a quiet, mostly solitary life heading a French art school for children in New York. She has finally found a kind of equilibrium. A way to exist that keeps her happy and in which she is not a threat to anyone around her. But that’s about to change. There is a new student whose home life she can’t seem to ignore. She also finds herself always hungry—very worrisome given her dietary requirements. And, she can’t help but feel as though she is being stalked. She has a dark feeling that things are about to change....and ending is coming but she doesn't know what that means.

My Thoughts

One word: Spectacular.

That is a word I rarely use to describe a book and that I have never used regarding a 1st novel.

This is not the kind of book that I typically read. I do read horror and there is a vampire—but it’s not at all a typical vampire story. I generally read thrillers or mysteries. Books where there is a clear path. A premise is set early on, and the book is a constant progression toward resolution. While I suppose there are aspects of that in this book (Collette’s drive to figure out who is stalking her or why her life seems to be changing), the book is more so an exploration of her and of life itself. The real mystery being delved into is existence.

Holland builds a narrative with expertise rarely seen in a new author. She is able to seamlessly move between timelines, countries, cultures, languages, customs, and settings. She turns typical literary tropes upside down and explores how vampires are terrorized by people—not the other way around. Collette is very much a “humanistic” vampire. She has killed, but never for herself. She spends most of her life either trying to avoid people or defending those who can’t defend themselves. And she can’t die, which is a vehicle to dig into life itself. Is life a blessing or a curse? Are people inherently good or bad?

I REALLY enjoyed this book, and not at all for the reasons I thought I would.

This was such a different read, considering that we have had many vampire lores before this. I really enjoyed the direction the book took so the readers and our main character can reflect back on the life of immortality and what it is like to live such a life.

I went into this book thinking it would be similar to Anne Rice with vampires on the prowl. However, this book wasn’t focused on vampires, but more on love and family.

This was the life of a young girl who died due to a virus that struck her entire village 200 years earlier. Her grandfather gave her a chance to live forever again, yet she was on her own and was never prepared to live alone and amongst adults.
This was her story of how she was able to grow up as a vampire and still feel like she was only a child.

Great story and well done, but it was overall too long.

I used to not really be a fan of vampire stories, but I think this book has changed that. It’s not all gore and is more a range of historical fiction, introspective, and dystopian. I really enjoyed how each chapter switched eras in time for the same person.

Jacqueline Holland crafts a masterful new take on the classic vampire tale. Wherever the protagonist goes, the god of endings seems to follow and destroy her happiness. Relive the narrator's struggles, her loves and losses, as she lives multiple lifetimes across the US and Europe. Great for fans of introspection, historical fiction, and vampire tales. This book has mild to moderate gore and plenty of losses as vampire fiction. Will she finally out run the god of endings and find happiness? Please note that I was given an advance reader copy to review via Net Galley.

I wrote about this on The StoryGraph (with buzz and link sent to Mastodon) and on GoodReads (with link sent to Twitter). My thoughts can be found at those sites.

DNF @ 50%

I was so excited for this, but man was it slow.

Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for providing me with an arc in exchange for an honest review.

The first chapter wowed me so much that I ended up reading a quarter of this nearly-500 page novel before I could put it down and go to bed. There are two storylines to follow here, told in alternating chapters. One chronicles the beginning of Anna's life as a vampire, in a superstitious Europe hundreds of years ago, and the other is set in the 1980's, when she has become Ms. Colette, headmistress of an American art school for children. The juxtaposition of two different timelines unfolding simultaneously can be unwieldy; to balance them as gracefully as Holland does here requires considerable labor and storytelling power. This is an extremely well written book, especially considering it's a first novel for the author.

I wanted to like this so much more than I did.

First, alternating chapters between the past and present. When the hell is that trend going to die? I'm sick of trying to read a book's prequel and the follow-up at the same time. It only ruins the narrative flow and pacing for both stories and leaves both feeling staggered. I despite it. All of the chapters set in the past were just things I had to get through until the actually interesting story (present-day) started up again, and even that was more domestic drama than "vampire."

I hope people enjoy this book, but I feel like it's not enough of any one thing to be satisfying to anyone in particular.

"The blood is the life." (Bram Stoker)

Jacqueline Holland creates a journey into the macabre in The God of Endings. That journey will take us into unexpected realms of existence involving a dark dance with mortals being shadowed by the depths of the immortal. What we'll find here is a rare glimpse into one of these night creatures who is tormented by her own being and her own nature.

Anna lived long ago in a small village where tuberculosis, "the wasting death", had taken over the population Antiquated mindsets feared that these dead would have an impact on the living. Anna's father could hardly keep up with his business of engraving headstones for these recently dead. But soon, he will be taken by its grip as well as his wife and baby daughter.

Before long, fever visited upon Anna herself and she died of the affliction and was buried in the cemetery alongside other family members. But an awakening was destined for Anna. She rose from the mounds of dirt sealing her coffin from the living. Anna's grandfather came for her. He bestowed upon her a gift that she never asked for.......the gift of immortality. The weight of it will follow her to infinity.

Holland waves us into the future at this point. It's 1984 and we come upon Collette LeSange in upstate New York. Collette is the head mistress of an art pre-school for the elite. We will be taken with Collette and the love she has for those in her charge, especially one artistically gifted boy by the name of Leo. Collette realizes that Leo's family life will become a great concern throughout this novel. Our admiration for Collette will continue to grow. But we will stare long and hard at what is a definite reality for Collette.

Jacqueline Holland is a superbly gifted writer. Her descriptors and panoramic scenes are breathtaking in The God of Endings. Please note: Don't cross into this one if you are not by your own nature intrigued by classic vampires and their exploits. But this particular creature of the dark is lined with a compassionate soul and a sense of duty to those within her circle. Her encounters with others through years upon years will leave us turning pages madly. Collette will battle her inner longings continuously. And we as readers will follow her to the ends of the Earth.

This is my first 5 Star review of the year 2023. It deserves that and more. Believe me, keep your eye on Jacqueline Holland. She is a rare gift, indeed.

I received a copy of this book through NetGalley for an honest review. My thanks to Flatiron Books and to the talented Jacqueline Holland for the opportunity.

Look, I have been burned by surprise vampires before (looking directly at you Joyce Carol Oates), but Jacqueline Holland's debut The God of Endings really delivered. The novel follows Anna from the early nineteenth-century, coming to terms with her "change" as she travels across Europe in turmoil, to her life in the 1980s running an elite preschool as Collette LeSange. Bouncing around her timeline, Anna is haunted by Czernobog, the god of endings.

A kind of philosophical meeting of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue and Interview With a Vampire, Holland contends with the pitfalls of immortality, the ethics of "predation," and the responsibility of giving life. There are moments where the pacing drags, but as a reflection of the repetition of loss: Czernobog's endings. Some of the events of the past are left unresolved, which was frustrating for me when everything else is so neatly tied together.

Holland crafting a haunting and gorgeous gothic debut novel that strikes at the heart of lonliness and obligation. Thanks to NetGalley for the advanced copy.

The God of Endings is the debut novel of Jacqueline Holland, and released on March 7th, 2023. It is the story of Anna, a young girl born in the 1800s who contracts tuberculosis as a child, and is granted eternal life by way of vampirism after she passes. The novel alternates back and forth between scenes of the “modern-day” Anna (who runs an elite preschool in 1980s upstate New York), and the past, where Anna becomes a vampire and lives through the centuries. In the modern day, Anna is becoming ravenous and uncontrollable: her hunger comes faster and more strongly, and she begins to have memory loss. She finds herself awakening in unfamiliar places with soiled hands, with no understanding of what transpired. Anna tries to find the cause of this insatiability while managing her preschool and dealing with a troubled child that attends it.

The God of Endings brings a lot of strengths to the table. Holland writes with a solid, consumable prose that frequently dips into moments of beauty. For the most part, the book is tightly written, and chapters are fast and don’t overstay their welcome—I found it to be a page turner when I least expected it too, and the book read fairly fast overall. Holland’s clearest strength is her ability to write emotion, something that The God of Endings leans heavily into. Feelings of melancholy loneliness oozed effortlessly off the page due to her writing, and the tone of the book was captured well from cover to cover.

However, my favorite aspect of The God of Endings revolves around the titular character. Czernobog, the Slavic “god of endings” haunts the life of Anna throughout both past and present. From Anna’s perspective, it is obsessed with ending her relationships and happiness, dominating her life and making its presence known with ash and the smell of smoke whenever it comes. I found Czernobog be refreshingly different compared to the usual antagonistic forces I encounter. It is less an villainous actor and more a force of nature you must contend with: not an individual, but an inevitability. There were a few segments of The God of Endings where Holland really leans into the Slavic lore and a sort of half-lucid fever dream atmosphere, which shined as my favorite parts of the book. Holland can write weird really well, but didn’t seem to touch on it all that much here. I hope she does in the future.

Unfortunately, some weaknesses became apparent throughout The God of Endings as well. The present-time sections were dominated by interactions at Anna’s preschool, or with preschoolers themselves—however these talk and act unlike any preschooler I’ve ever encountered. Holland tries to cheat past this by emphasizing this is an elite preschool and that these are incredibly intelligent children, but it just doesn’t pass muster for me. These act like obviously older kids, and the conversations feel clichéd and limited as Holland struggles to balance writing actual preschoolers versus writing something that fits into her mature world. It may seem small, but it irked me enough throughout the novel that it was overall fairly detracting.

In the past sections, there simply isn’t enough time spent with each side character in Anna’s life to really inject any verisimilitude into the relationships. When they come to an end, the reader is left only with the emotion of Anna, as we have not developed a meaningful connection between the characters. I would have really preferred it if Holland cut out one or two of these past segments in order to spend more time with the others.

Despite some strengths, I ultimately found the biggest weakness in The God of Endings to be Anna herself. Unfortunately, I found nearly every character in the book to be more engaging and interesting than the main one. This is exacerbated by the use of first-person narrative: the reader is privy to every thought that goes through Anna’s head over the centuries, so you better make sure it is full of good ones. It wasn’t. At times it seemed like Anna lacked any intellectual curiosity at all, and instead of problem-solving we only get lugubrious whimpers. At times Anna felt like she was 190 going on 19, and I got to the end of the book feeling like she had learned nothing over the centuries aside from fluency in a half-dozen languages. I am apprehensive about using the term “idiot ball” to describe a plot, but I lack a better one. The problems Anna faces seem to be largely ones of her own incompetence.

I’ll give two examples. At one point, Anna is worried about finding a blood source after she loses access to her neighbor’s cows. But, we have seen chapters where Anna lives for decades by hunting! She also owned her own livestock in Europe for this very purpose—yet both solutions are just ignored, and Anna laments her situation before flailing around carelessly. At another point near the end of the book, Anna encounters a fellow vampire from her past. She conveniently does not ask them about the central conflict of the book—her vampiric hunger suddenly growing out of control, which at this point is dominating her existence. In fact, after they leave, Anna says something along the lines of “I can’t believe I forgot to ask them about that!”. Give me a break. If you ever write that sentence, something has gone very, very wrong with your plotting.

Although it has strong writing and a unique Slavic influence, I ultimately found The God of Endings to be a fairly average read. I mostly enjoyed my time with it, and there were sections that I really enjoyed alongside some sections that made me roll my eyes. I think Holland has a lot of talent with writing and prose, although I’d like to see the plotting improve in her next work. Fans of vampire books might find this worth picking up.

3/5 stars.

You should read The God of Endings if:
-You’re in the mood for a vampire story that emphasizes contemplative loneliness over violence.
-You enjoy split-narrative books, particularly ones that alternate across time periods.
-You’re intrigued by books that have influences from Slavic mythology.

Thanks to NetGalley and Flatiron for an advanced readers copy in exchange for an honest review.

3.8 stars

Collette LeSange is a vampire like creature that runs a high end preschool in New York. She is immortal and drinks blood but can be out in the day. The book goes over her current life and back through her past. Collette gets involved in the family life of one of her students and his erratic parents.

I enjoyed the book but it was a bit too long. .

The God of Endings was a little difficult to get through. Although it wasn't bad, I wasn't as charmed as I had hoped to be. I usually enjoy slow-paced novels, but this one wasn't for me. This book delves into what it means to be human, hope, how to cope with difficult circumstances, and grief. The writing is lovely, and the book was overall enjoyable to read.

The prose in this book is undeniably beautiful. And it makes you want to fold yourself in the words. The way Holland compares death and nature could legitimately bring tears to my eyes.

It's why it pains me to say that the plot itself didn't grip me the way I wanted to. The split timelines felt a little too disjointed and jarring to keep me engaged, and while the prose was beautiful, I had a hard time caring about the characters and the plot. For the most part, it didn't really feel like there was a point, so it made it difficult to want to continue reading.

This was ambitious but just didn't work for me.

Thank you Flatiron Books and Netgalley for the arc!

I cannot recommend THE GOD OF ENDINGS enough. It’s a unique and interesting story about a vampire named Collette LeSange. Over many many years, she has finally created a life for herself. She feels at peace, until one day her ties to one of her students brings back her cravings. We move around between timelines to get a glimpse into Collette’s past and I ate it up. At 480 pages, I could not put this book down. It’s dark, contemplative, deals in life and death, and good vs evil. Holland wrote a stellar debut. Do not miss this! Hello…It’s VAMPIRES!

The God of Endings is a story about a vampire. However, it reads more like a philosophical tale weighing the pros and cons of immortality. It is slow and sometimes confusing. It is probably best for literary fiction fans rather than fantasy, horror or even historical fiction readers. Still, it is beautifully written so 4 stars!

Thanks to Flatiron Books and NetGalley for a digital review copy of the book.