Thank you to MIRA (via NetGalley) for the ARC.

I am not entirely sure what I thought about this book. For the first 85% of the book it was a pretty slow-moving book about a punk rocker vampire girl (Louise) who doesn't like other people (or vampires) just trying to survive during a blood shortage when some long lost relative show up. And then towards the end it turned into her joining forces with the local boss vampire (and her human great-nephew) staging a coup to overthrow the ancient vampire rulers who control the entire vampire population and make rules for everyone without any "regular" vampires getting any say in anything. A very "taxation without representation" vibe (and, I kind of hate to say it, but very hard not to compare these all-powerful ancients to the Volturi in Twilight).

I thought the constant music comparisons were a little heavy handed. I get that Louise is obsessed with music, but not everything has to be a metaphor for music and musicians and the music industry. It got a little repetitive.

Overall, I wasn't super impressed because of how slow the first 3/4 of the book was. It felt like all the action was saved for the last quarter, and considering how long it took me to get to that point, I feel like it could have been a little better paced.

This book shines with the author’s love for music and all things supernatural. I enjoyed getting to follow and understand Louise as a character and while I did find the jumping between timelines confusing at first, it was an interesting way to get to know Louise’s journey as a vampire and a person as a whole. There were some aspects I wish could’ve been expanded on more, but I understand why the author didn’t do so; this was Louise’s story.

YALL!!! This book has little bit of everything to make this one stand apart from the crowd. It also was the perfect remedy for my longest reading slump I have had in years!!

[book:Vampire Weekend|60666852] by[author:Mike Chen|1155463] hit all the high notes of how the modern vampire would live in todays “big brother” world!

I loved the development of characters and the plot was spot on. Showcasing music, family, forgiveness, love, hungry new age vampires all mixed up in a hilarious emotional uplifting story!

Do not miss out on this amazing book!!!

Thank you @HTPbooks @Netgalley for my gifted copy in exchange for my honest opinion!

3 stars

This really wasn’t for me. I had high hopes and the premise seemed so good. It was kind of boring though. I thought it was supposed to be funny, yet it felt a bit depressing. Nothing really happened. I’m sure it will have people that love it, just not me.

Has a great premise, but is clearly for the “no plot, just vibes” reader. I love the world building with modern vampire and their inclusion in the punk rock scene. But there’s little to no plot, and the characters aren’t enough to maintain my engagement for a novel length book.

A fun book which challenges the myths around vampires. Yes, they live among us but rather than the dark fantasy, their lives are actually pretty mundane.

A quick and easy read with some good characters.

Apologies in advance for all the vampire puns. I hope they don’t drive you TOO batty.

‘Vampire Weekend’ by Mike Chen was truly the best. I was beyond excited to sink my teeth into this book, and it didn’t disappoint. This vampire story full of heart, family, and home was love at first bite. Louise’s passion for music – and Louise herself – was one of my favorite things. She’s such a great character – all the characters are, really – and she might be a vamp, but her emotions, her heart (take a shot for every time I say ‘heart’) were very human and relatable. I also really loved Chen’s unique take on vampires. I highly recommend this HEARTwarming novel. It’s bloody good, and it’ll totally suck if you don’t pick it up.

I wasn’t sure if I was gonna like this….

It’s not normally the type of book I read. But I’m so happy I did. This book changes the mythology of what we perceive to be a vampire.

Love it!

Mike Chen crafts a beautifully poignant exploration of 'otherhood' in Vampire Weekend. Using vampire mythology to tell a story of how punk rock can connect us to humanity is masterful. As usual, Chen shows his superb talent as a writer and continues to prove that he can safely and carefully write female characters in ways many male writers simply fail to understand.

I wanted to like this book, it started off so exciting.
Mike Chen does presents very interesting ideas about vampires as a race, and vampirism as a way of dealing with the finality of death (especially in light of COVID, which is mentioned in the novel -- definitely the first time I've seen COVID in a vampire novel!). I also was intrigued by his take on a Chinese-American vampire and excited to see how this might influence the story.
I really enjoyed the premise of the book, and the characters were enjoyable - but by the 30% mark I had to give up. It just wasn't the story I wanted. Good for someone else, but not for me.

I love Mike Chen's books! He is so good at crafting a novel full of supernatural or sci-if elements and then places real world families and all of their complex problems right in the center of the story. Vampire Weekend is a fascinating take on vampire lore and I absolutely loved it. I read this book in one afternoon after intending to only read the first few chapters to get a feel for it. I should’ve known I was never leaving that chair.
Thank you to Netgalley and the Publisher for the opportunity to read and review this title. All opinions and mistakes are my own.

If you are looking for a dark horror about vampires, I would stray away - this is more of a fun book that surrounds the mythos of vampires, but it's more of a contemporary novel that happens to have a main character who drinks blood and cannot go out in the sun. I did actually really enjoy the lore of vampires that Chen included in this book; it felt similar to what we know, but different enough that it made Chen's world feel unique. I also really loved the family aspect of the novel. Our main character, Louise, really grows throughout the book and opens up to having a family and working through her unresolved feelings towards her parents before she turned. Additionally, I could really tell that Chen has a passion and love for punk music because that really bled through the pages (hehe). However, the downfall of this novel is with its overall plot. For the majority of the plot, the background plot was bland and then it does a 360 and is just wild at the end - it just felt so off the whole book. I think if the novel was longer and this background plot was more expanded upon, I could've liked it more.

Being a vampire isn't anything like what books had said, but Louise does have longevity. When her brother Stephen arrives with his grandson Ian after his father is killed in a car accident and his mother is undergoing cancer treatment. Louise takes in Ian for the weekend, and he discovers her secret. She wouldn't want him to feel as lonely as she does, and doesn't know how to change someone into a vampire anyway. When Ian runs away, Louise has to find him before elder vampires discover that he knows the truth and before Stephen finds out she lost him.

Louise Chen is a vampire and still wants to be in a punk rock band, though it's far harder than it otherwise should be. She can't go into daylight, she's allergic to garlic (to the point that she sneezes blood and bleeds from her eyes), and is beholden to a larger community determined to keep vampires a secret. She had shared her secret with very few people in her life before: basically, her aunt who had been disowned for having a girlfriend and her best friend who was also into punk music. With Ian's mother dying of cancer, Louise identifies with the anger and feelings of loss that he has. They bond over music and guitars, and he's a smart kid. He figures out Louise's secret easily and wants her to turn his mother into a vampire to save her life. At the same time, there are odd things happening within the larger community and a truly invasive app that makes it all a bit more complicated.

My heart went out to both Louise and Ian. They're isolated, whether from their interests or circumstances around them. Louise was pulled into Ian's worry for his mother, opening back up to connection and love after being so introverted and isolated for so long. Once Ian goes missing, Louise was pulled into the larger vampire community as well as back into family, and the entire second half of the book was a wild ride. I loved it, as I loved other books Mike Chen wrote.

Forget everything you think you know about vampires. They can't fly and sucking blood is just too much work when blood donation centers do all the work for you. A typical Vampire Weekend might be cleaning your house and running errands. Of course, you are a night owl, but other than that, you seem pretty normal. You, as does everyone, continue to have issues with your family members.

It’s the family problems that permeate this novel that I have the main issue with. I wanted Anne Rice’s exotic and dangerous vampires (or even True Blood’s undead at least before the fairy twist.) I got a family drama set in a vampire’s boringly normal world.

However, maybe you like reading family dramas. If so, Vampire Weekend may be fine for you. For me, it didn’t hit the right notes and seemed overlong. 3 stars.

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

Meet Louise, who really wants to join a punk rock band. Easy enough to relate to, right? I would agree if not for the vampire thing. Yep! She's a vampire, and she wants to be in a punk rock band. Other than that, she's pretty average.
Mike Chen addresses lots of the myths surrounding vampires in Vampire Weekend, blows them all to pieces, and then he does his own thing. And it just works! In this case, it's all about a punk rock loving vampire and her relationship (or lack of) with her family. I thoroughly enjoyed these characters and the places Mike Chen took them. The story is imaginative and fun in addition to being very well-written and thought-provoking.
To sum it up, yes, it's a story about vampires, but it's also about so much more than that. It's a story of family and the lengths we'll go for them. Honestly, with everything going on with Ian, Louise is a great choice for someone he can talk to. If you haven't read Mike Chen, you really need to. He definitely keeps things interesting.

Mike Chen always writes original novel that plays with the classic trope of a genre and mix them in a way which is innovative and entertaining.
This novel plays with vampires, making fun of all the classic lore, and showing us that being a vampire is not all glamour and being sexy.
Louise, like all her heroines, is a mix of strength and fragility. She’s looking for connection and she’s afraid to connect. Until she meets Ian and things starts moving and changing.
This is a great novel if you grew up listening to punk, garage and a lot of the groups that are listed in this story. I was creating a playlist while I was reading and playing it in my mind.
There’s grief, there’s fear and there’s a lot of humour.
A novel that shows a different side to the vampire myth, an excellent urban fantasy.
Many thanks to MIRA and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

Vampires are back, baby! I was so excited to get a copy of this (thank you, Harper Collins!), and I'm so glad I did!

Louise is jaded by vampire life, and it's so nice to read a book that features the not-great parts of vampirism: being alone, not having easy access to food, and, worst of all, losing friends. Would I have used my eternal night life to see every punk show in California, too? Of course! But I would also probably get pretty lonely.

Ian's anger is so well done. Of course he's cocky, he's 13, he knows everything! But it was still heartbreaking to read all of his shitty luck. I really hope if there is a sequel, we get more of his inner workings.

This was a wonderfully quick read (easy to knock out in a weekend), and I think it's screaming for an adaptation! 4 out of 5 fangs!

One Sentence Summary: Louise has been a vampire for decades and has settled into her new existence, but everything is upended when some relatives show up on her doorstep.

I like Mike Chen’s books. He’s managed to make me enjoy reading about superheroes and aliens, so I had hoped to enjoy reading about vampires for the first time ever, because vampires are so far away from what I like reading. Vampire Weekend kind of felt like a love letter to vampires and music, and, reading his author’s note, I completely got it. But…vampires are still not for me. Sadly, this book was missing a lot of the heart I’ve come to expect from his books, but I still did find it fun and amusing. The predictability made this a little boring, though it did take some interesting turns towards the end, so here are three reasons to read this book.

Vampires
Vampire Weekend is all about vampires. Many of the chapters even started with different vampire myths that we’re all probably aware of by this point. It was interesting to see Chen’s particular take on vampires as Louise commented on what was true and what wasn’t. I did like how some of the myths were true in this book, which directly led to some interesting precautions Louise had to take. It also contributed to the larger vampire story, which the reader isn’t privy to until it’s actually going down because other vampire characters were organizing it and Louise and a teen relative were pulled into it. I do wish the vampire revolution had been a bigger part of the story because I found it and the ideas behind it fascinating and perhaps even a bit applicable to life today.

What I wasn’t so keen on in Vampire Weekend was that it felt like it was trying to either debunk vampire myths or create its own mythology and history. Now, I don’t have a problem with that and even found it fascinating, but I felt like the story was sacrificed a bit for the sake of really going into what vampires were actually like. To me, it read like a book about vampires rather than a fictional story. It was fun, though, to see what these vampires decided to do with their long lives and everything they’ve had to go through. It definitely didn’t make becoming a vampire particularly appealing, but it plays a role in another story line that showed how it could actually do some good.

Music
Music is just as big a part of Vampire Weekend as the vampire part. I mean, it’s all about a punk rocker vampire who’s just trying to find a band she can jam with. Even though Louise is a vampire, it’s just a part of her, even if she spends most of the book believing it’s the bigger part of her that she can’r quite access because, you know, she’s a vampire and vampires have very specific parameters they need to live within. She’s had to sacrifice her love of music a bit for her vampire lifestyle, but I liked how the book shows her how she can have both worlds. It was great to see her teach, and just hang out with Ian, a relative who drops unexpectedly on her doorstep. They’re connected by music just as much by blood, and it was fun to see them introduce music groups to each other. The family part wasn’t as big of a part of this book as I had expected, but I really loved how Louise and Ian connected through music and came to understand each other despite the years between them.

Vampire Weekend felt like it dropped in band names, musicians, and different types of music as much as it did vampire myths. I’ll be honest and say I recognized almost none of it, so I felt like I missed out on a layer in this story. Or maybe not. The music part was a key part in the second half, but I don’t think what kind of music was particularly important. Maybe there was something it added, but, for me, it was just kind of a decoration on a cake. My favorite thing about this part was just how it helped tie a family back together.

Dysfunctional Asian American Family
This is where the heart came in. Chen’s books tend to have a family component, and this one didn’t disappoint. Unfortunately, this felt like the smallest part of the story, but I latched onto it and loved every bit of it. I liked that it features Louise as a first generation Chinese American, so it goes into her childhood and adolescence several decades ago with very Chinese parents. There’s not a lot of acceptance or forgiveness; just a lot of expectations and disappointment at any kind of failure. Fortunately, Louise isn’t the only outcast in the family, so she manages to find a home. My favorite part was when Louise would remember her youth, putting herself and her found relatives in context. There’s definitely some dysfunction from the very beginning, and I really felt for her, wanting something different from what her parents expected. It’s complicated and messy, but, unlike in previous books, Vampire Weekend didn’t spend a lot of time picking apart the threads. Instead, it seemed to resolve itself fairly quickly when it did manage to become the focus, which was disappointing because this is usually where the heart comes in and I was just disappointed it was largely missing and shoved to the end after the big vampire events.

The best part of this family component was definitely the relationship between Louise and Ian. There’s a vast difference in their ages, but she becomes something of an anchor to him, especially as his mother lies dying and his grandfather seems absolutely lost, and she seems to need their new relationship just as much as he does. Their relationship goes a long way in helping their family heal and find solutions. It was cute, and I especially enjoyed Louise’s dog, Lola. Ian and Lola were cute together and I definitely smiled at those parts.

In Sum
Vampire Weekend is an interesting book that takes vampires, music, and an Asian American family and whirls it all together. It did feel like some pieces were flown out of that whirlwind, but it did come together and the components did rely on each other, so I liked the cohesion, even if the music references flew over my head. I do wish it had been a little less focused on the vampires, but I did appreciate Chen’s hand at developing his own vampire mythology. While this wasn’t what I was expecting and it wasn’t for me, it does have some really good parts, especially towards the end, and there are great strides made in the vampire community, which was really a lot of fun to get to see.

Thank you to MIRA and NetGalley for a review copy. All opinions expressed are my own.

Lately I’ve been obsessed with vampires and I wanted to love this book so bad but it fell short for me. Although I appreciated the family aspect of the book, I wanted more from the vampires. These vampires were boring and it just wasn’t what I expected. Three stars!

Louise is used to being alone. As a vampire, she isn't allowed to share her story, which necessitates keeping people at a distance. For a while she made some great memories with her Aunt (whose house she then inherited), and then spent some good time with a new best friend who finally learned her secret. But when her best friend dies prematurely and she isn't sure if it's because he knew her secret, she decides not to let anyone else get that close again.

She works her midnights job, and laments the fact that real vampires don't have nearly as many fantastic powers as the legends promise. As a blood shortage sweeps the area (yes, the blood-drinking thing is real), she struggles with what may be a necessary evil - staying connected with the rest of the vampire community.

And because one major change isn't enough to deal with after a few quiet decades, a few distant family members end up on her doorstep. Of course, since Louise has stopped aging, they don't really recognize her, but she has to decide whether her solitude or her actual family is a greater priority.

Overall, I enjoyed the presentation of a new kind of vampire lore. Louise, her dog Lola, the local vampire community leader Eric, and Louise's distant nephew Ian must slowly learn where they stand with each other, and what that might mean for each of them. I gave this book 4 out of 5 stars as a fun, quirky fantasy-ish story in a contemporary and realistic setting.