Not perfect. Other reviewers have touched on the unnecessary and weak wokeness element of the story and I agree. I don’t think it was as well executed as I think the author intended. The homophobia was the oddest inclusion to the story. You would think that immortal beings would actually be okay with non-heteronormative relationships - considering they’ve been around for hundreds of years.

VAMPIREDOM
That said, I think the author did a goos job of showing how values and perceptions of others can be ingrained in young minds. The students at the school are taught a very specific curriculum that upholds this fantastical view of vampiredom. Lots of callbacks to old dreary castle days when vampires feasted and glamoured on humans. There’s a small group who believe that vampires and humans can live peacefully among each other. But the majority feel that it is beneath them to interact with humans. Humans are servants to be glamoured, and drinking from humans is the equivalent of doing illegal drugs at a house party. Out main character is an outsider who has lived among humans her whole life. And her introduction to the school shakes things up.

SOCIAL JUSTICE ELEMENTS
It’s true that our main character is the quintessential stereotype of a social justice woke teen. She is a bit holier than thou towards her elitist peers but I found this part actually very realistic. I think the great thing about youth is how passionate they can be. But I think the author also shows how it’s easy to fall into performative activism or to simply parrot things you’ve seen online about what it means to be inclusive without really taking time to understand things. Kat often contradicts herself in behavior. And the youngblood vampires at the school were taught since birth that their way of life is normal. It was understandable to me that they would dismiss things when Kat pointed things out to them (e.g., impact of colonialism, lack of diversity). Three of our teen characters go through self-awareness and discovery, and become much better people with a clearer sense of right and wrong.

That said, this whole theme was not executed well and I think it weakened the overall story.

DEPICTION OF VAMPIRES
I really disliked this view of racist, homogeneously white, and homophobic vampires. I don’t think we needed these elements in the story. It could have just been a story about power and control. I’m not saying that books with a social justice theme are not needed. They absolutely are but I think for me it was trying to add those elements in a story with vampires, an immortal creature, that I couldn’t fully reconcile. Racism and homophobia feel very much a human behavior. In my mind vampires are simply elitist over humans because they are natural predators and immortal.

DARK ACADEMIA & ROMANCE
With all that said, I did really enjoy the boarding school setting and teen drama. The characters were pretentious, wealthy, and scheming. The side characters were well-developed, with the exception of a few adult characters. I enjoyed the teacher-student interactions. The romance was a slow-burn friends-to-lovers romance. Really it could be an enemies-to-lovers one too but since Kat and Taylor were friends before and they make up before getting together romantically I find the chemistry is closer to a friends-to-lovers romance.

As a dark academia book, I liked how the tone wasn’t heavy. I think some dark academia books tend to be intimidating for me. But if you’re looking for a prep boarding school setting that gives off the vibes of dark academia then this is a solid choice. Despite all its issues, I did enjoy this book. It was a fast-paced story with lots of vampiric elements that made this a fun book to read during Fall/Halloween season.

**Thank you to the publisher for providing me an arc to review.

Thank you to Penguin and Netgalley for sending me a copy of this book. All opinions are my own!

If I had to describe this book in one word, it would be disappointing. I was so excited for the book, but it did not live up to anything that I had expected in any way.

The most annoying thing about the book was how the MC has a white savior complex and how the book is centered around her being woke. She is the only one who cares about literally any social justice cause, and the book literally revolves around that fact. She is constantly trying to prove how woke she is, despite also being an absolute pick-me girl. All she truly wants is to be like the rich kids, despite going so hard for every cause she can think of.

The romance was very forced and also slightly weird. Taylor's relationship with Evangeline is insane and made me extremely uncomfortable. There was definitely a better way to show homophobia than to have Taylor hooking up with someone who is constantly belittling her. Taylor and Kat ending up together also felt very weird just based on everything else that had gone on.

The plot itself was something I had been very excited about, but it took way too long to actually get to the meat of the plot. There was no point to the first half of the book being a high school drama and then suddenly adding in all this mystery of CFAD.

In the end, this book did not live up to what I thought it would be.

I tried to give this one a fair shot, but I just can't read a book that uses POC and queer characters as well as "woke" exclamations to attempt to seem progressive, but then doesn't back it up with any actually progressive substance, and even worse, uses problematic tropes and Harry Potter references in the year 2022. I ended up DNFing about halfway through and was unable to continue.

Lesbian, vampire, boarding school? sign me up immediately. I loved all of the characters and just wish there were more books after this one.

I haven't read many books with vampires and I am a sucker for academies/boarding schools in books so I lovedddd that about this book. It was also a really fun one to annotate as well. There were parts that I struggled to stay hooked and others where I couldn't put it down. The inconsistency with the pacing was one of the reasons that this wasn't a perfect 5/5. Another reason was my connection to the characters. I liked them, but I didn't love them. Over all, a good book.

This is a fun but uneven supernatural YA romance. I love vampires, lgbtq+ stories and boarding school books, but the writing and plot wasn't quite up to what I hoped for.

Thank you so much to Penguin Teen for the ARC! Sadly, though, YOUNGBLOOD was just not it for me. This was a real bummer because Youngblood was arguably one of my most anticipated 2022 releases! (sapphic vampires? boarding schools? dark academia vibes? Sign me up!!) However, I could not get past both Kat as a narrator and the blatant homophobia and discrimination at Harcote. While I'm not going to dive into all of the more ~problematic~ elements (as I'm not part of the specific marginalized communities affected I don't feel qualified enough to speak on the topic, but I would highly encourage you to seek out other reviews so you can get a better understanding of what I'm talking about!) they definitely impacted my level of enjoyment.

And while the boarding school/dark academia was at least somewhat well done, it sadly didn't really do enough to make up for the chaotic mess that was everything else in this book.

Overall, as much as it's breaking my heart right now, I'm rating this one two stars. If you are looking for a (far better!) YA sapphic vampire book, I would encourage you to check out THE LOST GIRLS by Sonia Hartl instead (I promise that you won't regret it!!)

I got a free copy of this book for a blog tour that eventually was cancelled. There are a few parts of this book that readers had issues with, so I invite you to search the reviews and educate yourself on why readers are upset.

For me, Youngblood was a 3 star book regardless of the inclusion of some questionable material. The book is marketed as a sapphic paranormal romance, but for a majority of the book, one of the main character thinks she's straight. As a result, the romance doesn't happen until very late in the story and didn't get developed much. Additionally, I thought the main plot of this book seemed like it wasn't fully fleshed out. There were many times where I felt like I was reading a draft rather than a completed product. I agree with many other reviewers that idea of racist and homophobic immortal beings doesn't make sense to me. On top of that, the lore of what impacts these vampires in terms of strengths and weaknesses is never completely explained. If you were to ask me how the sun affects the vampires in this book, I wouldn't be able to answer you. There is a brief sentence about the sun making the main character queasy, but I don't remember the book ever expanding on that.

I've been trying to figure out how I should review this book for a while now. Unfortunately, I could not get through this. I was so excited to read a queer (especially sapphic!) vampire novel after having consumed so many heterosexual vampire books in my younger teen years, but this one unfortunately had so many problems that I simply could not get past. Not only did I find the characters unlikeable and hard to root for, but the main character, Kat, was especially problematic. I also found it so disheartening that the school was so homophobic. The plot could have easily been furthered along without the discrimination aspect to it, and it would have been so cool and amazing to see an inclusive and all-accepting school. So, even though I had high hopes for this book and so desperately wanted to love it, I unfortunately couldn't make it through it. Even so, thank you to the publisher for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

Youngblood has a juicy premise, however, the paranormal setting is just a vehicle to discuss pertinent social issues while circumventing well-loved genre tropes. Overall, Youngblood offers an enjoyable sapphic vampire tale that does include fascinating world-building and excellent character work.

This is messy and has a quite a few tropes and plot devices that I am not a Big Fan of in a story that could have done without those and focused more on different struggles in the vampire hierarchy.

While the concept of youngbloods is great- it’s not very well done.
Yes, it’s an LGBTQ+ book.
But the internalized homophobia is strong and the characters are dense and quite problematic.
Listen to the voices of POC reviewers before you read this one (:

This is messy and has a quite a few tropes and plot devices that I am not a Big Fan of in a story that could have done without those and focused more on different struggles in the vampire hierarchy.

Kat Finn is a part of a generation called Youngbloods, vampires that are born from other vampires. While Kat was raised in a low income household, she somehow gets a full ride to Harcote, a school for the richest and most elite of the Youngblood generation. The one downside: she might have to room with her ex-friend Taylor, who she left years ago.

The only praise I'll be giving this book is in relation to the worldbuilding. I did like how this story put a twist on what we already know about vampires and how this disease that humans get can be a threat to vampires. However, I've read some reviews that the CFaD disease has some glaring resemblances to the HIV/AIDS crisis, which... yikes.

OKAY let's dive into the more problematic aspects of this story. First, the blatant homophobia that occurs is beyond disgusting. Kat deals with a lot of internalized homophobia as she starts to realize that she herself may be queer. While I get that, and it is something I know a lot of people still face, this was taken pretty far to the point where even I felt uncomfortable. Also one of her friends says that "Straight people always assume it's something you have to discover, but I was born this way." Not everyone has that experience, especially me. If you're a young reader who's reading this and is already questioning your sexuality, this might throw off their whole experience and potentially ruin how they come to terms with it.

I've also heard that there are some anti-Semitic comments but I recommend going to a Jewish reviewer that would have more information on this than me. But there's a lot more, because there's also RACISM and making COLONIZATION seem okay. Galen, one of Kat's minor love interests, is half Indian. Here is the dialogue from one of their discussions.

"My dad was involved with the British East India Company back in the day, so that's where they (his parents) met."
"You mean the British East India Company that colonized India?"
"He winced. 'It's not as messed up as it sounds. My mom doesn't talk about it much, but she's from a wealthy merchant family in Gujarat, and he spent years pursuing her until she agreed. He didn't just make off with a helpless girl from some village. Anyway, it was a long time ago."

LIKE WHAT IS THIS?! I had to take a massive second glance at this paragraph to make sure I read this right. It made it seem like that Galen was okay with it? I don't know it rubbed me wrong in so many ways.

And don't even get me started on woke white girl Kat, who is convinced that she is the "ultimate ally" who wants to push for inclusivity and diversity in all corners. It was extremely unbelievable to me that she acts as this savior that will change all of Vampirdom, and the fact that she keeps bringing up the whole "why don't you join the vampires of color club" to Galen is so messed up in so many aspects. Having a white girl savior in your story is not promoting that diversity.

Oh and there's one other POC in the story, who is Chinese, and they really make her an antagonist and give her almost no redeeming qualities. The author wants to push for this diversity and it could have been SUCH a good way to make a comment about modern society but the lack of that proper representation ruins it completely.

Kat also makes some really weird comments that come off as insensitive to groups of people, such as saying that dresses were nice, but only if "you were a depressed librarian or really obsessed with tarot cards." And this wasn't Kat that said this but at one point a teacher that oversees Vampire Ethics (yes, that's a class) says to Kat "Sometimes debates challenge us, but discomfort helps us grow." Again, don't really know how I feel about that line.

The relationships were so messy to the point that I felt almost no chemistry from these characters, especially from Taylor and Kat. I didn't care at all about these characters. Even the ending was beyond messy. For how complicated this world was, the ending was somehow wrapped up with a pretty bow when it shouldn't have been. The people you expect to be the villains are the villains, no plot twists or nothing. It ruined the ending for me.

While Youngblood had the potential to be this inclusive, queer and powerful book that brings in massive commentary on our own world. Instead, it tried too hard that it became the opposite of what it was trying to preach. I would not recommend this book to anyone.

I received a copy of this story as an ARC from NetGalley and Penguin Teen. Any and all thoughts and opinions are my own.

I'm sad to say that this book did not hit the mark for me. It only took a few chapters for me to find the main character lacking. I didn't like anything about her or the other characters. Other problems I found in the book but I think those have been covered by other reviewers already.

Thanks to PenguinTeen for the earc in exchange for an honest review.

I really wanted to love this one. I mean, sapphic vampires at a prestigious vampire boarding school? Sign me up! But it fell flat for me. Some of the characters were annoyingly obtuse and a lot of the really interesting worldbuilding wasn't ever explored or expanded upon. Interesting premise, but that's about all I can say for it.

I was so, so excited about this book. Unfortunately, after encountering some really unsettling approaches to/attitudes about colonialism, race, and power imbalances, I was unable to finish it. The premise was so strong! The cover was so good! I wish I'd been able to enjoy this book as much as I'd hoped to, but I couldn't look past passages that really could have used another sensitivity reader and some more critical thought. Maybe next time?

I will not be reviewing this one. I am aware that there was offensive language found in it and I did not want to read this one because of it. Thank you for giving me the chance, but I'd rather not.

I was having fun with this romance and was super excited about the comparison to Vampire Academy. When I started reading it I could see this comparison and how it would focus on class dynamics. I thought okay this is great! However, as I kept reading I felt exceedingly more and more uncomfortable with the events of the book. I could not pinpoint why and found myself putting the book down and reading something else. After a few days, I came to the conclusion that I was not satisfied with the main character. Kat comes from a poor family and attends this prestigious and elitist private vampire school. She is constantly reminding the reader of her economic background, which got annoying pretty fast. I guess it made sense because she was obsessed with status. Another thing that disliked about Kat was how performative she was. It felt as if she was checking off boxes to get “woke” points. She would ask questions about the diversity in school, but wouldn’t actually do something. She was more interested in how to learn to use her privilege to get her ahead. Also, I just found her POV insufferable because ALL she cared about was status. It was all she talked about and constantly complained. Any characters of color in this narrative are painted as villains or erased from the narrative. There is one particular instance of a colonizer being excused, which was horrible. This book was a massive disappointment and would not recommend it.

Review posted on Goodreads (March 31, 2022)
Review linked.

I am personally taking down my review because, due to my white privilege, I did not see the issues that this book had within it. I recommend looking at own-voice reviews that discuss the issues within the book and I apologize for my part in promoting it and not seeing the issues.