Lucy Undying

by Kiersten White

Her name was written in the pages of someone else’s Lucy Westenra was one of Dracula’s first victims.

But her death was only the beginning. Lucy rose from the grave a vampire and has spent her immortal life trying to escape from Dracula’s clutches—and trying to discover who she really is and what she truly wants.

Her undead life takes an unexpected turn in twenty-first-century London, when she meets another woman, Iris, who is also yearning to break free from her past. Iris’s family has built a health empire based on a sinister secret, and they’ll do anything to stay in power.

Lucy has long believed she would never love again. Yet she finds herself compelled by the charming Iris while Iris is equally mesmerized by the confident and glamorous Lucy. But their intense connection and blossoming love is threatened by outside forces. Iris’s mother won’t let go of her without a fight, and Lucy’s past still has Dracula is on the prowl once more.

Lucy Westenra has been a tragically murdered teen, a lonesome adventurer, and a fearsome hunter, but happiness has always eluded her. Can she find the strength to destroy Dracula once and for all, or will her heart once again be her undoing?

Genres: Fantasy, Horror, Vampires, Gothic, Romance, Lesbian, LGBT

451 pages, Paperback

First published September 10, 2024

About the author

Kiersten White is the #1 New York Times bestselling, Bram Stoker Award-winning, and critically acclaimed author of many books for readers of all ages, including the And I Darken trilogy, the Sinister Summer series, the Camelot Rising trilogy, Star Wars: Padawan, Hide, Mister Magic, and Lucy Undying. She also has a very large tortoise named Kimberly, which isn't relevant, but she wanted you to know.

Visit her online at kierstenwhite.com.

Reviews

[Clace · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.50!

The whole book was giving Castlenova energy and I loved that show +the premise and the cover was so hard to pass on so it was already going in the right direction for me but then I actually started the book and my main problem would be the pacing it was so terribly slow and it dragged so much that I had to skim a bit because if I didnt it would've been a dnf. I would have never been able to move forward. I also appreciated how we got more than one point of view but the author was clearly struggling with managing three point of views at ones. The characters actually had me hooked at the start but as the book progressed they were dulled down and to be honest this was a very forgettable book. Ask me anything about this book in 4 days and I wont be able to tell you anything about it. Lucy's character for me was very sloppy and immature. Mina was just boring. Im giving this two stars because the first half was somewhat enjoyable. I have had Kirsten's trilogy and I darken on my tbr for 5 years now and I was gonna read it this year but after this book I am pushing it down because I was so excited for this and the disappointment was real.
~~
I saw vampires and I saw the cover and said let's gooo!

*Thank you to Penguin Random House for this arc*

[Kim · Rating 1 out of 5]

If Scooby-Doo and the gang had been on this case, it would have been solved in half an hour, including commercials. Alas, Scooby wasn’t on hand to turn this melodramatic slog into something entertaining before we find out that late-stage capitalism was the real villain all along. Instead, in Kirsten White’s latest novel, Lucy Undying, we the readers are afflicted with more than 450 pages of disorganized epistolary mish-mash that gives fanfiction a bad name.

Why do I summon the spirit of fanfiction? Because in her acknowledgments, White declares that, while she (claims she) loves Bram Stoker’s original Dracula, she firmly headcanons the notion that multiple main characters were involved in a conspiracy to disinherit Lucy and take her family’s holdings for themselves. Also, White seems to think that all the characters in the story secretly loathe each other (which is strange, given how you have instances like Jonathan straight up saying he’d follow Mina to Hell if that was what it took to be with her), and goes as far as writing the “secret diary of Lucy Westenra”, in which Lucy expresses how awful her mother is, how terrible her three suitors are, and how much she hates the society she lives in. See, this Lucy is actually a twenty-first-century girlboss in Victorian clothes because White is one among many authors who don’t seem to be able to do research and find out just how dynamic and outspoken women have been throughout history. But why do that when you can just make your edgy heroine sassy and spiteful to everyone around her and call her “feminist”?

And because we have to find out how Lucy survived the events of Dracula and see what she did throughout the twentieth century, we have “client transcripts” with Lucy’s therapist stuck in between the other main character Iris’s sections and the ‘secret diary of Lucy Westenra’. In these transcripts, we find out how Lucy did things like find a super-secret society of women vampires and stop a major war all by her lonesome by walking in and telling the big-bad generals to stop the fighting right then and there, because she said so.

This wan shade of Lucy Westenra is not the only character we have to endure, though. We also have to put up with Iris, a twenty-first-century American woman on the run from her mother, the leader of a cult-like MLM business who is apparently dead (but maybe not). Thanks to nepotism, Iris is set to inherit the family business, but she wants nothing to do with the business because she has morals. So instead of taking the reins of said business to take it down from within, Iris runs away to somehow be free and yet still try to dismantle said business from without. How will she do this? It’s anyone’s guess including, probably, the author’s. For plot reasons, Iris has fled to London and goes to an abandoned mansion in Hampstead Heath to look for antique furniture she can pawn, instead of just selling the mansion- which belongs to her. Why doesn’t Iris work on selling the mansion that she owns? Well, plot reasons. It would be harder to engineer the (second) meet-cute with a ravishing blonde woman whose identity you’d never guess in a million years.

*sighs*

Some other problems I had with this book:

- The Godalming family is constantly called ‘Goldaming’, and sure, that goes along with the name of the book’s nefarious MLM, but because ‘Goldaming’ is applied to Arthur Holmwood, Lord Godalming, it just looks like White got the name wrong. And sure, I also made that mistake when I first read Dracula, but perhaps you’ll forgive me that because I was twelve at the time.

- In her secret diary, Lucy claims that she doesn’t know how to grieve because her smothering society something or other. But Victorian England is famous for its mourning customs, so… why can’t she grieve?

- Iris is incredibly paranoid because the MLM people are out to get her, but she lets a trio of people waltz right into her life without checking their credentials in any way. I guess they’re just so pretty that they just have to be the good guys.

- These versions of the Dracula characters in no way shape or form resemble their original counterparts, but I guess we’re in a realm where the headcanons are entirely made up and the original source doesn’t matter.

With all that being said, I’ve changed my mind. This mess wouldn’t fit into a half-hour episode of Scooby-Doo. We’d need one of their animated movies, so we can stuff everything in and also make sure that there’s plenty of time for Daphne and Velma, because whatever queerness you might read into that relationship is far deeper than anything Iris has going on.

If you take anything from this review take this advice: don’t read Lucy Undying. Go read Bram Stoker’s Dracula instead. It has plenty of problems of its own, but at least it makes sense and has interesting characters. And after that, go watch some Scooby-Do, where late-stage capitalism is the real villain, too, and you’ll actually be entertained.

-

Thank you to NetGalley and Del Rey for providing me with a free review copy.

[Mia · Rating 1 out of 5]

How do you make sapphic vampires boring this needs to be studied.

[Nilufer Ozmekik · Rating 4 out of 5]

You know what? This book’s cover deserves more than five stars with its eerie, powerful, striking concept that you can’t take your eyes off! And another aspect I’d like to rave about is Lucy Westerna, a great, well-developed character that draws you into her story; you don’t even want to put it down! Especially her transformation into a vampire and her afterlife story intrigued me more than the present-time insta-love story with Iris. I didn’t care much for the instant story part, but I found Iris’ character development not as layered as Lucy’s, which made it hard for me to connect with her, even though I understood her efforts to break free from her family legacy. But at times, I found her a little immature, which rubbed me the wrong way.

The diary entries and the psychiatrist sessions impressed me more, and thankfully, Lucy’s life story, the sacrifices, struggles she faced, her self-exploration in finding her place in the immortal world, her perspective about her maker Dracula, her sexual exploration, and her attraction to Iris, her years-long epic journey, are all well depicted with a balanced pace: not too fast or slow down, still keeping you on your toes and craving more. Even though this is a really long book, you don’t get bored, stop reading, or skim some chapters because the thrilling sapphic journey of Lucy grips you from the first chapter, and you want to know what fate awaits her. This tantalizing, unique, original journey is a riveting fantasy exploration that I highly recommend to readers, especially those who like main characters with fangs!

Many thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group / Ballantine / Del Rey for sharing this remarkable fantasy novel’s digital reviewer copy in exchange for my honest thoughts.



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[megs_bookrack · Rating 4 out of 5]

**3.5-stars rounded up**

Lucy Undying is an Adult Gothic Fantasy novel that reimagines some classic character arcs from one of my favorite novels of all-time, Dracula.

This is the 11th-book I've read from White. I had really been looking forward to it ever since I read the synopsis and first laid eyes on the stunning cover.



With a clever use of mixed media, as well as an intriguing present day narrative, White spins a tale spanning across generations. The way the historical and present perspectives were played off each other was very well executed.

As the synopsis notes, one of the main characters in this story is Lucy Westenra, who Dracula fans may recognize as Mina's best friend. She's also known to be Dracula's first victim in the UK.



In Lucy Undying, White imagines what would have happen to Lucy after that, for her story didn't end there.

In present day, we follow Iris, who's family owns a health products empire. Her mom has recently died and Iris travels to London to stay at a mansion, known as Hillingham, that she's inherited.

It's there she makes new friends, explores the past through the pages of a journal she discovers hidden in Hillingham, begins to find her true self and hatches a plan to escape from the clutches of the evil company her mother left behind.



This story is layered. There's a lot happening. Initially, you aren't 100% on how all the different elements are going to come together, but each perspective is equally intriguing.

I loved the idea of the Hillingham house. I could just picture this neglected gothic property and loved Iris's time there. Those scenes at Hillingham are some of my favorites from the entire novel.



I also did enjoy Lucy's perspective. The more historical portions were well connected with the original source material and I liked hearing Lucy's side of all that: her suitors, her mother, etc.

I was obsessed with this story for the first 65%. There was so much going on and I was enjoying the back and forth of it all, trying to piece it together.

However, around that 65% mark, there's something revealed, where after that, I was almost over it. There wasn't much intrigue left for me and I struggled to see how we still had so much story to go?



It did drag for me in that second portion, but picked up again in the last 10%. For me, I feel like this could have been cut down a bit, but that's purely personal taste. NGL, I was over it, but others may eat it up the whole way through.

Overall, I felt this was a clever reinterpretation of Lucy's story and an interesting exploration of where that could have gone. I know some true Dracula fans may be turned off by how much this changes some of the MCs of Dracula, thinking of Mina in particular, but I think you have to appreciate White's creativity with it.



Thank you to the publisher, Del Rey, for providing me with a copy to read and review. I enjoyed this one and can't wait to see what White delivers us next!

[Brend · Rating 5 out of 5]

Welcome to my rant!
[Not about the book, though. The book was great]

I need people who’ve made certain classics their entire personality to stay away from retellings. This is very clearly not for you. It’s for people who like fun.
If I read one more ‘’Ohhh nooo, they’ve ruined this one character! They would never do this! This is not how the story goes!!’’ I will become violent.

The only new-works-related-to-classics that need to respect all of that, are those that have been approved/requested-to-be-written by the people who own the original works.
If you’re hired to write a new Nancy Drew novel, sure, you’ll have to follow their guidelines.
Retellings are not it.

They’re supposed to change shit. Why would I pick up the same exact story, just worded differently by three new authors every year? This is madness.
It’s a ‘’what if?’’

What if it happened during this time in history?
What if we made this character good and this one evil?
What if we added magic?
What if we took the magic away?
What if we tell it from someone else’s point of view and make the original protagonist unreliable?
What if we add backstory to these unexplored characters?
What if it’s gender-bent?
What if [insert quite literally anything here]?

If a piece of literature is so dear to you, that any alteration to its original structure would be insulting, why would you purposefully pick up retellings? If you would only enjoy the exact same story but with more chapters, then you do not want a retelling. Leave them alone.

‘’Why not just write something else entirely if so much will be changed?’’
Because we like fun. It’s fun to be presented with something we know well and then have the whole thing turned upside down. It’s fun to have both the comfort of something familiar and the surprise of new shit. Everything has been done before, so we’re already taking inspiration from something else each time we come up with a story; it’s fun to lean on the inspiration if it comes from one obvious sourse.

I love Buffy. Would never pick up one of those Buffyverse-inspired novels. Because I know I’m way too attached to the original show, so I don’t want to read someone’s ‘’what ifs?’’. I don’t care about their takes on characters and storylines. In my brain, the actual show is untouchable. So I just.. don’t consume those novels.

See what I did there?
See how easy?

[Riley · Rating 2 out of 5]

*sigh*

[talia ♡ · Rating 2 out of 5]

jesus christ look how they massacred my boy (bram stoker's dracula characters)

---------

to whomever designed this cover…please hmu because i need to give you a kiss

[nikki | ཐི༏ཋྀ​​݁ ₊ ݁ .]

dnf @ 42%

well that was disappointing.

incredibly slow-paced, unexciting characters, and writing that leaves much to be desired. three POVs are being juggled that could've been utilized much better, but instead they all drag on.

[Svea · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oof, this is a tough one to review. It's always heartbreaking to start a book you're really excited for and have it end up being a big disappointment all around. Lucy Undying has all the right ingredients for an extra tasty meal, but if you don't cook 'em right, the end result will still taste like ash.

Lucy Undying tells the story of Lucy Westenra, spanning from the events of the original novel and her survival of them to the modern day. So far, so intriguing. It's being told through her diary entries, records of her therapist session and the point of view of Iris, the young woman who finds Lucy's diary decades later. It's a great premise and Lucy is an interesting character. Sadly, a great premise doth not a great book make.

I started having doubts pretty early on when White apparently consistently got the name "Godalming" wrong. At least I think that's what happened, because I didn't find any other reason for her to constantly write about Lord "Goldaming" and his ancestors' big "Goldaming" MLM. If there was an intention behind changing the name, White never told us. As it is, it reads like a very weird and easily rectified mistake that should have been noticed considering the name comes up regularly throughout the novel.
The writing is, in general, okay but the dialogue is very stale and often cringey. The plot is convoluted and gets worse with every page. The pacing is rather slow and quite frankly, the story drags and drags and is surprisingly boring for a Dracula novel. There's a central romance that could have been great but suffered due to bad dialogue, lack of chemistry and Iris as a character, because she's just insufferable most of the time but White clearly wants her to read as "cool and quippy" with some added awkwardness in romantic situations. It's also just very instalovey, and to top it all off they call each other "my little cabbage" and "my little butter chicken" and just, no. Yes I get where the names come from, no they're still terrible.
And then there's Lucy. I wanted to love her because hey, it's Lucy Westenra, but in this novel she isn't really allowed to be that. There's no actual exploration of her tragedy, of her inner broknenness beyond the superficial. Instead, she is turned into some kind of vampire Badass Superheroine that, I kid you not, is basically solely responsible for ending World War I, is stronger than any other vampire she meets that isn't Dracula himself, and somehow inspires every age old vampire lady (she only ever meets major female vampires, because this is a ~feminist retelling, you know) to become her Best Self and Be Nice. How she does this I can't tell you because I sure wasn't inspired by anything she does or says. She's also not allowed to have any flaws whatsoever. Yes, she talks a big deal about being a monster for killing people, but every other character keeps telling her that actually, she's doing great, she's killing the right people (bad men, Nazis, ya know, the thing superheroines do), she's innocent, she's a victim whose survival everyone is in awe of. She's also allegedly very clever, yet doesn't figure out very obvious things and is clueless about the modern world despite living in it. She simply isn't a well-written, complex, consistent character. She reads like a watered-down woobiefied fanfiction version of Lucy Westenra, and I'm not talking about the good kind of fanfiction.
But really, the same can be said about all the original characters. Without spoiling too much: In her acknowledgements White writes that she's absolutely convinced that Lucy was the victim of a conspiracy by basically all the people involved in her life who were only ever out for her money. That's what this novel is. Everyone is evil but Lucy, who is flawless, and Iris, who's the cool rebel that's fighting for all the right things and really wants you to know about it, too.

Does this read like a rant review? Probably, and I apologize for that. But the disappointment is real and there was just nothing that could save this book for me. I do hope others might enjoy it more.

Many thanks to Del Rey and Netgalley for the arc - I'm sorry this wasn't for me.

[Eloise Blaise | Bibliophel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Guys, I’m still thinking about the first half of this book. The writing, especially the diary segments, were stunning. I still can’t even look at the cover without thinking about Lucy.

[Erin Craig · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brimming with White’s signature wit and razor sharp prose, LUCY UNDYING is a gothic masterpiece, playfully paying homage to one of Bram Stoker’s most maligned characters and letting her shine for the heroine she is. I absolutely adored everything about this book.

[blank ⁺‧₊˚ ཐི⋆♱⋆ཋྀ ˚₊‧⁺ · Rating 1 out of 5]

Full review to come at a later date, for now just know that if you’re looking for an “epic and seductive gothic fantasy” you won’t find it here

[Clarissa Labue-Pham · Rating 5 out of 5]

I must admit that I bought this book solely for the spectacular cover art done by Audrey Benjaminsen. Many times there are books with phenomenal covers and less than stellar stories. This book, is not one of them.

Lucy Undying is a sumptuous gothic tale full of atmosphere, interesting characters, startling plot twists, Sapphic romance, and feminist themes . The Story constantly moves with different points of view and varying timelines. There's so much depth and detail in this story that I'll be thinking about for this one for a while.

In this haunting tale we are introduced to Lucy Westenra, Mina Murrays ill fated friend from the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. We follow her as she finds herself, reminisces about the past, deals with trauma, falls in love, and meets an eccentric cast of characters. I want to say more about this feminist take on a classic character of gothic literature but I can't say much without giving away a story that really has to be experienced for ones self.

If you're looking for a deep work of gothic fiction and dark fantasy then reading this book needs to be a priority. If you find yourself in the mood for sapphic love, dark fantasy, and horror then look no further because Lucy Undying has it all. Really, I can't recommend this book enough.

[Kerensa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hi, I have an important message for you. It's too late for Kiersten White to see this, but maybe I can help someone else.

If you have to read a classic book (like Dracula) in college, and you find yourself only liking one character and hating all the others...you don't actually need to write a retelling of that book that valorizes your fave at the expense of villainizing everyone else. And if you do end up writing a retelling, it's totally okay to keep that book in a drawer of your desk, where it cannot torment me, personally, instead of inflicting it upon the world.

This is a retelling of Dracula focusing on the character Lucy Westenra. I like Lucy. Lucy tends to be reduced to Mina's slutty BFF before getting killed off, so I when I first heard about this book and saw the cover, I was cautiously intrigued, because Lucy frequently does deserve better than adaptations give her.

Alas.

Additionally, this is a book about the heir to a Utah-based vampire MLM trying to escape and/or destroy their evil family's evil MLM empire, and those two story ideas - Dracula retelling "empowering" Lucy and vampire MLM - don't really mesh well. Maybe they could have. But here, they don't.

I have a LOT of thoughts and a lot of things to say about this book, but as I was writing them out, my stream-of-consciousness ramblings started to feel a bit unhinged (even to me), so here's a shorter review in the meantime.

If you like Dracula and its characters, I doubt you'll like this book that much. Its interpretation of pretty much every character is shallow and uninteresting, ranging from Lucy as a perfect pure sad rich girl victim to the suitors as overbearing idiot men to Mina as the cartoonishly evil architect of Lucy's downfall. At points, it genuinely just reads like Kiersten White trying to convince you, the reader, of her opinions and headcanons about Dracula characters, and why all of them are bad except Lucy. And the ways in which Lucy is interpreted and supposedly empowered also felt very shallow as far as feminism goes...So as an adaptation, it did not do a lot for me.

I was pretty here for the vampire MLM story, though! I think the idea of a vampire MLM set in Utah is genuinely SO funny. Once we got to the second half, where the MLM is a much bigger focus, I kind of wished we had scrapped the Lucy connection and just written an entire book about that idea, focusing on Iris' efforts to bring down her family. Maybe it even could have been connected to Dracula in some vague way (RIP Renfield you would have loooooved MLMs). But not...the way this book does it, because I think the way this book does it is stupid.

Also, I'm curious to know what people who haven't read Dracula would think of this book, because I actually think there's a solid chance this book would not make sense if you don't already know the plot of Dracula. And that's kind of a bad thing, in my opinion. Retellings should be able to stand on their own, and I'm just not convinced that this one does.

So yeah. At some point if I finish my longer and more rambley review, I'll link to it.

[♥Milica♥ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm always seated for sapphic vampires! And, I guess, Dracula retellings too, after this.

Lucy Undying was a read I thought I'd need a bit longer to get through, because the pacing seemed so slow, but I literally read 70% of it in one day because I couldn't stop reading, so how slow was it really? I can't say. What I can say though, is that this story gripped me, and kept me hanging on every single word.

I feel like most people probably found Lucy's chapters more interesting, but for me, Iris was the character I kept wanting to go back to every time I was reading about Lucy, or the secret third PoV.

That's not to say I disliked Lucy, I still found her history entertaining, and I liked the romance between her and Iris. I could feel the longing through the pages, and kept wishing for them to finally be happy.

My favourite thing about this book, is the never-ending number of twists. We get the majority of them in the second half, which is, no surprise, the half I enjoyed reading the most.

I saw only a few coming, but when Iris started putting things together in her head (and with all those pages), I was in shock. And then I kept getting surprised all the way until the end.

The gothic atmosphere was on point, I enjoyed the writing style as well. This is actually my very first book by Kiersten White, even though I've had her books on my tbr for years. Now I know I'll probably like the others too.

The plot is very well crafted (if a bit unbelievable at times), but I do think it's stretched out more than it should be. Especially in the first half where we didn't get as much action as the second.

Aside from that, I don't really have any other negatives. It was such a fun read, and I'd love to have a sequel of some sort, because there's definitely more story to tell.

*Thank you to the publishers and Netgalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review*

[káliná · Rating 1 out of 5]

work emails have found me in better state than the state in which this book left me.

[Jan Agaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

low 4 because there were one too many twists/reveals & I wasnt a fan of every POV being a different tense. it made it feel messy & inconsistent to read. however, the writing is stunning especially in the first half even though it got a bit melodramatic/angsty by the end, but this had all the vibes I wanted An Education in Malice to have. I also wasn't expecting Dracula to be a character, but ironically (for me bc I love the classic), I got more bored at the point of the book when he made his appearances.

[Azhar · Rating 1 out of 5]

lucy, girl, no offence, but kinda wish you stayed dead.

[Steph ✨ · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 Stars.

Thank you to Del Rey for sending me an ARC of this.

I'm truly gutted to be writing this review. I had every intention of finishing this before release day (only 3 days late) but I struggled so hard to get through it. I got 50% in and had to wait till release day for the audiobook just to help me finish this one.

The book started off well, I was confused but the different timelines and POV's but overall, I was very intrigued to know what was going on and find out what was happening and how everything linked together. However, it was really slow going, which may work for some people but just didn't for me. I also have to admit that I haven't actually read Dracula before (I intend on doing so now) so therefore am not familiar with Lucy Westenra which I feel is to my disadvantage going into this book.

I am an avid DNF'er so anyone who knows me will be surprised when I say it took me 30 days to get through this and I wanted to put it down and never come back 50% in. But on the basis I was sent the ARC and the book did start off intriguing for me, I was determined to finish it. Unfortunately, this just didn't work for me.

[Jackie ♡ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sapphic vampires, baby 🩸

Rating: 3.75 ⭐️

Lucy Undying was pretty good! The narration on the audiobook was really well done. New narrators were introduced for any different POV characters (of which there were a couple), and it did a good job differentiating the 3 different timelines: Iris in the present-day, Lucy as a vampire, and Lucy pre-vampirism.

I found the 3 timelines very interesting but most importantly, I found that they all added to the story. Even though only 1 out of the 3 take place in the present-day, it didn't take me out of the story. All three drove the plot forward and introduced very important characters into the narrative.

The book could get a little bit frustrating at times since Lucy is a naive teenager and then a clueless vampire not realizing she was and had been taken advantage of by basically everyone she's ever known. However, other than that, it's an engaging story!

── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──
Pre-reading:
Alright babbyyyy let’s read a vampire book for spooky season 🎃

[Cecilia · Rating 2 out of 5]

lucy ending both world wars and changing three centuries old evil vampires with the power of friendship bc she’s just built different 😌😌😌

[HorrorBabe911 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This story was amazing. I loved how it integrated parts of the original Dracula story. And yes Lucy definitely deserved this story. It read like invisible life of Addie larue (which was also brilliantly beautiful). A deff must read for vampire lovers.

Funny, emotional, creepy (at times) and will get you angry (I hated Dracula in this story). But it’s a good paced book n the audio book was great as well.

[thea · Rating 1 out of 5]

(1.5) this is the last time i fall for a pretty cover (it’s not)

[G · Rating 1 out of 5]

bestie it's "Godalming"

Thanks to the publisher for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review!

Lucy Undying purports to tell the story of "Lucy Westenra" during and after the events of Dracula, as she becomes a vampire and wanders for centuries, having various gothic adventures, meeting other vampire women, and pining for her lost love, Mina. In the present day, it tells the story of Iris, a young woman attempting to flee her ultrarich family and their MLM cult, which might be hiding something more sinister than its Clean Beauty-esque lifestyle branding suggests. While trying to sell things in the old Westenra mansion for quick cash, Iris finds Lucy's old journal and also bumps into the present-day Lucy, now living under an alias. As they fall in love, they realize they may be more connected than they thought.

So there's this tumblr post, by user @marisatomay. It goes "People will claim to be a fan of some thing and then hate all of the themes and motifs and story lines and plot lines and protagonists and antagonists [...] like man I don’t think that you actually like it here." That, to me, sums up this book and everything wrong with it—whether she admits it or not, its author clearly hates the original Dracula, and goes out of her way to assassinate every single character and, essentially, reverse or undo a good deal of the major plot points. It's a reading so paranoid it's been institutionalized right next to Renfield.

A perfect example of this contempt for the source material? Main character Iris is descended from Dracula character Arthur Holmwood/Lord Godalming, but throughout the entire novel, her name is misspelled "Goldaming." Yes, the protagonist's own name is misspelled!! I haven't encountered a flub this embarrassing since the old E.L. James fanfiction where she spelled Bella Swan's name "Swann." I really hope this error gets fixed in the published version, but judging by Everything Else about this book, I doubt it will. Oh, and the recurring Dracula phrase "the blood is the life" is also misquoted repeatedly as "the blood is life," just to really drive home the sheer indifference and inattention to detail.

So if this book isn't for readers who liked Dracula, who is it for? This was the question that plagued me throughout, and which I have yet to satisfactorily answer for myself. Lesbian separatists who either never read or hated the original Dracula but enjoy shallow girlbossification and don't mind glacial pacing, maybe?

It's probably faster if I list the things I did like about this book. The prose was fine. For the most part, I liked Lucy's modern love interest, Iris, and found her voice well-developed and sometimes even funny, especially in the first half of the novel. I liked some of the vampire side characters, like the Doctor and the Lover. And I enjoyed chuckling at the obvious Twilight reference right at the beginning ("adrenaline.") And that's....pretty much it. On the whole, it was a massively bloated diatribe about how much its author loathed Dracula, followed by what felt like an entirely different story about cults, featuring a third act that took longer to wrap up than Return of the King.

My main conclusion? If your reading of Dracula involves character-assassinating everyone from Van Helsing (here an "old Dutch pervert") to poor Mr. Swales (whose name is dragged through the mud POSTHUMOUSLY no less) to Berserker the wolf (who was a hoax, because I guess we're not allowed to have joy and fun), perhaps you shouldn't waste your energy retelling it. Food for thought.

tl;dr skip this and instead sign up for Dracula Daily, and if you’d like to read a good queer feminist Dracula retelling with many of the same themes, try S.T. Gibson’s A Dowry of Blood.

[Booksblabbering || Cait❣️ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sink your teeth into this story comprising a diary, a therapist script, and a modern day cult progeny escapist.

Lucy recounts what happened to her after becoming a vampire from 1890s Whitby across the world through all kinds of events and horrors up until the modern day.
These are equally funny and hurting and healing, filled with female rage, loss, grief and queer longing.
The QUEER LONGING. This tugged at my heart. She just wants to be understood.

Iris is a modern day heiress to a bloodsucking (quite literally) health empire where “blood is life”. She escapes to London to deal with clearing out her old family estate and find some semblance of freedom and independence. She is keyed in to her own identity and queerness. She is strong but trying to escape the shadow of the cult.

Both are women trying to escape controlling figures and come to terms with their trauma.

I understand why so many young women fall under his thrall. We’re trained to crave approval and acknowledgment, encouraged to force down our instinctive warning signals. Because what worth do we have if we’re not desirable? Sexually, sure, but also on every other level. Be likable. Be pretty. Be pleasant. Be small enough not to threaten anyone, take up only as much space as you’re given, be who and what they want you to be. I know exactly what Dracula is, and I’m still trying to figure out how to bend myself into a shape he’ll like enough to stick around. At least I know why I’m doing it.

Perhaps this has lower ratings because people wanted more Dracula, or expected as much. To that I say, yuck I would have been okay with even less.
Yes, the reveal and twists were very obvious, but I didn’t care.

This was slow-paced and I ate it up. The pacing and tone changed when the plots came together, however it was pulled off well. I was so scared about this as I couldn’t understand the lower ratings.

It did frustrate me how naive and immature Lucy was. The ancient vampire felt more childish than contemporary Iris.
I think there were character inconsistencies between the individual narratives and when they converge which was confusing and probably makes this closer to four stars than five stars. But it was close.🌟

The audiobook narrators did a phenomenal job. They gave such character and life to the cast.

Now I need to rest White’s backlog. Any recommendations?

Bookstagram

[Hailey Davidson · Rating 1 out of 5]

The parts that were a new and modern vampire novel were....fine. The parts that were a Dracula retelling were god awful.

The Girlboss-ification of Lucy Westenra

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Huge News This Just In: If you're forced to read classics in college and you absolutely hate them you actually do not have to write a retelling of those books! You have free will and you do not have to do all that, it's okay not to like Dracula.

LONG REVIEW AHEAD BECAUSE I LOVE BRAM STOKERS DRACULA AND I WANTED TO LOVE THIS BOOK.
This is a feminist retelling of Dracula, starring the ever-misrepresented Lucy Westenra. Except, in this novel she isn't really allowed to be Lucy Westenra. There's no actual exploration of her character, the tragedy of her life as shown in Stoker's original text, nothing beyond things that read as incredibly surface level and superficial. It's very clear that this author sleepily skimmed Dracula- and hated every second of it. For some reason that I cannot uncover for the life of me- they felt compelled to write this.

Lucy is transformed into a completely different character. She is a super powerful vampire, but she's incredibly moral- which means she only feeds on bad men and she basically ended World War I. She's incapable of having any negative character traits or flaws. She is not a well written character by any means, let alone even a ghostly whisper of her original character founded in Stoker's text.

Kiersten White writes in her author's note that she loves Bram Stoker’s original Dracula (highly debatable), and she firmly headcanons that pretty much all the main characters were involved in a conspiracy to disinherit Lucy and take her family’s holdings for themselves. This is a really interesting theory that I think could actually have some traction. HOWEVER. Why did we have to bring all that into this book? There's no reasoning that isn't a gigantic stretch and reach.

I will say- every single Dracula chapter was fantastic. It was so Joe Goldberg and it was perfect. I will say it's a little exhausting that every single male character in this book is a freak, pervert, sexual predator or misogynist. EXCEPT- for two severely underdeveloped men from the modern 2024 timeline who are gay. It's just giving me the heebie jeebies idk.

What's strange about this retelling is that the retelling of Dracula is finished around 300 pages in. Unfortunately, there's still 164 pages to go. Because there is a brand new character inserted into this mess so messily I couldn't even begin to describe. Iris is a clumsy, stale attempt at an additional, modern day protagonist. She's meant to be really quirky and funny and cute but she comes across as underdeveloped, leading to a main character that is very very VERY annoying. She's also run away to London to escape her dead mom's vampire Multi Level Marketing scheme cult...that is headed by....Dracula himself. So there's that. The MLM isn't even a half bad storyline- just half baked. It feels so hilariously out of place in what is meant to be a retelling and continuation of Dracula. It bloats this already too long and dreary book into something so confusing. There is too much going on. Kiersten White should have just wrote the vampire MLM book she wanted to write, and left Bram Stoker out of it.

This is also an insta-love romance in case you were wondering.
The two romantic interests call one another "My little Cabbage" and "My little Butter Chicken" respectively. They have no chemistry, and no development to their relationship at all. Their romance is sudden, obsessive, and goes nowhere.

I'm so mad about this I can hardly say more at the moment, so just take these few quotes and commentary as my conclusion on this book. This SUCKED.

"I no longer wondered why Dracula had killed and changed me, I wondered why I had let him."
This is NOT the feminist flex you think it is!!!!!

"Technically, I'm Pan. All vampires are since everyone we meet has at least one thing that we desire."
Girl.....come on now.

"This is the vampire who killed Lucy. This is Dracula, and I'm positive they didn't destroy them- because I fucking know him. When I was a kid, he almost killed my dad when I invited him in."
This is really giving he was with my mom in the Amazon where she was researching spiders right before she died.

"It's a 20 minute drive to campus, so I use it to decompress with my favourite modern poets. Yesterday it was Halsey, but today I'm feeling Wolf Alice."
bffr Halsey?

"Thank you for at last answering the questions I feared I would die with. The reason The purpose? The point of me? It was love. It was you."
Again, This is NOT the queer feminist flex you think it is!!!!! Attaching a character's worth to their romantic relationship is not good writing or sweet even if that relationship is with a woman.

"I couldn't have fully loved Iris until she loved me. Because I couldn't fully love myself until she showed me how."
This is fully a codependent and harmful way of thinking and it is NOT what practicing self love looks like! Hope this helps!

[Haniya Halana · Rating 1 out of 5]

That's one gorgeous cover art I must admit but what about the things in between the front and back?

Lucy Undying is the story of Lucy Westerna, Dracula's first English victim and the whole ordeal of her fate in the original Bram Stroker's Dracula novel. Lucy Westerna actually survived and lives through to the present day 21st century where she meets Iris, a woman who tries to break free of her own past.

One of the biggest flaw I could pinpoint to are the characters. Lucy Westerna is horribly inconsistent in her characterization. From her dialogue to her secret diary entries, she always sounded modern in thoughts and action even in the parts that took place in the past and it made Kiersten White very obviously did not do her homework on Victorian England or the period leading up and during WWI. I understand that she wouldn't be the same person she was after the event and the years she lived through but she's basically a new character whether it was in the past or in the present time. Then there's Iris, a present day woman and a potential love interest for Lucy. Iris is stupid, to put it kindly. A lot of her action defies logic and it was granting to read her parts. She's the daughter of a successful business woman who leads a cult-like MLM organization and was supposed to inherit all of her wealth after her mother's passing. Iris doesn't want the inheritance because it's blood money made by her mother's cult-like organization, instead choosing to loot various expensive items from a mansion she stand to inherit!? Iris is also on the run, in fear of the cult people getting to her and is supposedly paranoid but her action shows the opposite.

The plot is very straightforward. It's person A meets person B and A has a life to might be dangerous for B to be around but B understand yet still wants to stick around then there's a budding relationship, romantic relationship, and the will they, won't they stage was skipped entirely to, yes they will, with B having their own stuff to deal with. That said though, the straightforwardness of the story is padded with transcript of Lucy's therapy sessions and her secret diary entries from her time in the 19th century up until present day. The therapy session section weren't necessary and they slowed the pacing down immensely. The longer the story went on, the more apparent that White either never read Dracula considering "Godalming" is never spelt correctly or she did and she hates it for some reason.

As for the writing, the cinematography of the novel, it's written from a first person POV, even in the transcript of the therapy sessions. Despite being who she is, Lucy is written in a very plain manner. Iris too, is written in the same manner and they both sounded the same which is terrible job on White's part. The prose are basic but it wasn't static or stiff and was easy to read through despite the plainness and Lucy and Iris are essentially the same character.

This is not just a fanfiction but one that was born of a terribly misconstrued the original Bram Stroker's novel if the story note at the end was anything to go by.

[Quill&Queer]

unfortunately it's boring

[Stephanie (Bookfever) · Rating 5 out of 5]

🖤 Gothic Fantasy
👩‍❤️‍👩 Sapphic Romance
🧛🏻‍♀️ Vampires
💌 Epistolary

As one of Dracula's first victims, Lucy Westenra was just a supporting character in a story known by so many. But in Lucy Undying, Kiersten White retells her story in an exquisite gothic fantasy with a sapphic romance, engaging writing and memorable characters. It was a total page-turner that I couldn't get enough of, with never a dull moment in any of the chapters. I really can't recommend it high enough!

Most of the story is told in the point of view of Iris Goldaming, who is trying to run away from her family's legacy and corporation that is worth millions and millions of dollars. In various chapters the book applies an epistolary style in the shape of journal entries from Lucy in the late 19th century and client transcripts from a therapist in 2024. I'm a sucker for epistolary novels so this was a really nice surprise for me when I started reading this book.

In the journal entries we meet a nineteen-year-old, wide-eyed Lucy who's stuck in a world that's ruled by the men in her life, in her case these are her various suitors. No one knows that she's feeling a unrequited love for her former governess Mina Murray, who doesn't seem to notice her beyond a friendship. Through her journal entries we slowly find out what happened to her back then and how she tragically died and rose anew as a vampire. These entries felt really powerful in a way because Lucy could be honest in her writing about her love for Mina and her contempt for some of the suitors she had to deal with.

In the client transcripts we meet Lucy again but this time it's in 2024 and she has been a vampire for more than 130 years. She meets a therapist who Lucy tells her story to after she got turned into a vampire. I also loved these transcripts because we get to see this new Lucy as a vampire traveling the world searching for Dracula and meeting all kinds of interesting characters along the way. She wanted to find Dracula because he just left her as a newborn vampire with no purprose and no answers. I've gotta admit, I was pretty curious too.

With Iris' POV we find out that that Iris' mother has just died, which leaves the family's company all to Iris herself. The thing is, she wants nothing to do with the evil and corruption that takes on in the Goldaming corporation, which really is a malicious multi-level marketing scheme and went even beyond that. So Iris runs off to London to sell the houses and whatever valuables she can find there to get some quick cash, after that she wants to disappear. Along the way she finds some kind friends and even a love interest who try to help her in her endeavor. She also finds Lucy's journal hidden in one of the houses and slowly starts to read her entries, getting to know her through writing. I've got to say that I absolutely adored Iris. She definitely was one of my favorite characters, alongside Lucy herself, of course.

This book contained some much-needed female rage, which I absolutely loved and that I cheered the characters on for. The romance was also just beautiful. I don't want to say too too much about it all because I would hate to spoil this aspect of the story for anyone but they might be my new favorite couple of the year. There were a few plot twists as well, some I saw coming and others I didn't see coming at all. I really liked this because it gave me some gasp out loud moments. I also enjoyed the gothic feel of the book, the descriptions were lush and delicious and stunning. In short, what's not to love about this story? Lucy Undying was just the perfect book for me and Kiersten White absolutely knocked it out of the park with her latest novel. I would give it a million stars if I could!