I love my girl Pandora but after two thousand years she should really have learned something about toxic relationships. Accidentally, this makes her one of the most relatable of the Vampires, which in itself is very sad.

Given all her desire to be independent in her mortal years, her immortal life is defined by her relationships and the men she meets. Which is also sad. And in the end

she does it all over again

...

All of this makes this book and this character just so very believable and I did get the feeling none of it was romanticized, so I still love it as a tragic story about how we sometimes make the same mistakes over and over again. And a basic rule of Rice's Vampires is: we never really change, we just become more and more who we really are. But I still wanted something more substantial.