this is a difficult book to get my thoughts on, because i did genuinely enjoy a lot of it but i can see the criticism and agree with a lot of them. 

first of all, the toxic lesbian stuff is shockingly not that present despite being a major part of the marketing. and... to be honest some of it didn't have the sauce. the prose is amazing, and i loved charlotte and liked sabine for a lot of it, but alice was a niothingburger protagonist for me. her flashbacks just cut into a lot of the narrative flow and pulled me out of the story more than once. and her story was so cliche i could have seen the end coming from miles away. 

i wish this was more of a historical novel instead of being focused on the present. the latter half of the book was much better than the first because of charlotte's story taking over after alice, i love a character with a bleeding heart who can't stop hurting people because of her inability to stay unloved. yay representation, i guess.

i loved the themes of history mirroring and the need to break away from your creator's past to make your own, the parallels were great all around. the interview with the vampire part was so forced though, like lottie. girl. couldn't you just summarise it with

'my crazy ex vampire girlfriend is hunting me across the globe and killing everyone i love just to prove a point'?

i guess she told the entire story to try to make alice understand but. alice did not need that right now. 

sabine's about-turn was also kinda sudden. someone on the buddy read compared it to

shauna shipman s3 villain arc

and... well they're not wrong. i wish we could have seen more of that from her point of view. honestly more i think about it, the more i'm conflicted about this book. i might change my rating with time.