I absolutely loved this book! I'm a sucker for a good paranormal romance. (see what I did there haha) I love when a romance has me laughing out loud but also loving the connection between the two characters. You will fall in love with Lily and Tristan just like I did. I was not able to put this book down and read it in a day. Lily is an independent woman and not afraid to speak her mind but she also deals with issue with her self confidence. Tristan is a man who is stuck in the past and old ways of doing things. They both help each other to overcome these issues. Their back and forth back is hilarious and the heat between them is HOT. If you love vampires and a good rom com then MUST be your next read. I can't wait to see what the author will come out with next. I hope its a sequel about Lilys BFF Cat. But do yourself a favor and grab this book ASAP!

I know witches are having their moment right now (no complaints here), so I was very excited to pick up this vampire romance. This was a fun, quick read, but overall it was just fine.

I feel like this book tried to do too much and didn’t accomplish much. The book promises body positivity (and I’m very happy to see a fat woman on the cover), but Lily still spends much of the book still putting herself down and struggling to be happy with herself. The romance between Lily and Tristan also seemed lacking. I didn’t connect with them and really didn’t buy that they were in love. It all seemed very rushed with little spark and like they were only together out of necessity, but were supposed to believe it’s love.

There were some parts of this book that were fun. I really loved Cat’s character and all of the cheeky Twilight references. I think if you’re looking for something fun and light this upcoming spooky season you should give this a shot.

Thank you to Sourcebooks and NetGalley for an advance copy.

*I received a copy of this book on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for this opportunity*

In WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU VAMPIRES, token 'fat friend' Lily Baines is suddenly thrust into the paranormal world after accidentally becoming a vampire after meeting one. This book primarily focuses on Lily's journey of accepting her new vampire body (which is the same as her human, but with more advanced skills), fighting the growing attraction between herself and her 'master', and avoiding being killed for her status as an unsanctioned newborn.

Like I mentioned, this book is (arguably mostly) centered around Lily's journey into body acceptance. She, similarly to many fat women, has struggled with her weight for most of her life-- and joining the undead makes her look at herself with a new lens. If you personally struggle with your body, and could be triggered by the subject, this book is not for you.

Personally, I struggled most with following the romance. Tristan (the love interest and master vampire) felt simultaneously too controlling and too subservient (an interesting mix that I'm still not sure how it happened). The relationship felt too insta-love/insta-hate, and was mostly physical attraction until they started confessing love.

Overall, this book is a fun, easy read with vampires and romance-- perfect to curl up with during Halloween!

Wow, this was a book I was so interested in reading that I'm not going to recommend to anyone.

Lily Bane is a fat woman struggling with her body image, especially in comparison to her thin best friend and her fatphobic mother. When a handsome man offers to buy her a drink, she feels totally unworthy of his attention - and then he turns her into a vampire and her whole life goes off the rails.

Right off the bat, I wasn't meshing with this author's writing style. It feels very elder millennial - several sentences start with "FYI" or "Obvi," and it just feels forced.

But the whole thing feels stuck in the fat rep or body positivity of the early 2000s. Lily doesn't ever really learn to love her body for what it is - she really does end up seeing it through the lens of her love interest, a very boring vampire man who is a romance novelist, which I think is meant to be shorthand for the reader to understand he's ~good with women~ and ~in touch with his feelings~, neither of which are true. Even with the author's note at the beginning, I found the way that Lily thought and her mother talked about her body to be incredibly harmful. There's a weird moment where Lily realizes her fatphobia about herself has made her thin friend feel like she can't talk about things with her, because Lily always has a story about someone making her feel shitty about her body and so the friend's story pales in comparison, which really smacks of "tHiN pEoPlE fEeL bAd AbOuT tHeIr BoDiEs ToO!"

And Tristan is so unlikeable as a hero, too. As mentioned above, he's a romance novelist. This is really a way for the author to get you to assume he empathizes with women and gets the struggle of being a woman in the kyriarchy without having to do any work to prove that. It doesn't work! Tristan is stuck in the 1600s (like, literally at one point a former love interest of his tells Lily that he couldn't wrap his mind around her independence as a woman in the 1800s which is! wild!) and simultaneously refuses to tell Lily anything that would keep her safe and then berates her for not recognizing threats.

He changed Lily by accident: <spoiler>he was like... telepathically asking her if she wanted to be bitten, not knowing she'd already nipped him and had a bit of his blood? And Lily, for reasons that aren't satisfyingly explained, cannot have her brain gone through by a vampire, so when she's saying yes, it's to his offer to see her again and not to be a vampire. I HATE this non-consensual turning! And it's really compounded by his repeated memory-wipings of people they run into, even after Lily's made clear what a violation she thinks that is. He memory wipes her best friend! That's just gross.</spoiler>

Anyways, this was a disappointment from start to finish. I don't recommend it, and I think it's probably actively harmful. YMMV.

Lily is a plus sized 25 year old living in New York when she surprisingly wakes up a vampire after a night out. It is exciting to see a plus sized main character. While there was character development and growth, Lily seemed very two dimensional. Working towards body acceptance is a spectrum, one Lily was always at the self deprecating end of and I feel we missed the coinciding positive feelings plus sized women struggling with body acceptance feel. Lily, an aspiring journalist also had the voice of a pre-teen, not necessarily an educated woman(I.e. using the abbreviation natch in place of naturally.. Her character was the typical funny, fat friend, though I don’t feel we got to know her as more then that.
The book had the feeling of talking to a close friend and appeals to the gen z of readers.

This book was so fun to read!! Definitely would recommend it!! The characters and the plot was so much fun.