picked this up with no prior knowledge of julia fox beyond her signature makeup look and the fact that she dated kanye (who's, unsurprisingly, a fucking weirdo). finished it with a lot of respect for her and her resilience. she's has a truly tumultuous life and i hope things only ever get better for her and her kid. she should be allowed to kill men without consequence.

i listened to the audiobook and i loved that she read it herself. it felt like a conversation with a new friend.

i can only describe this reading experience as a rollercoaster. starts out promising, builds up for maybe a little too long, then the twists come and they don't stop coming, growing increasingly cartoonish in a way that made me stop taking the book seriously. then it's over and looking back it ends up utterly underwhelming.

can't even rate this because i have very mixed feelings towards it. and by "mixed" i mean i adore the show yet disliked the very thing it's based on. this might be the only time i've wholeheartedly thought the screen adaptation is infinitely better than the book. like, this is really my biggest takeaway from it.

i mostly read this because i'm interested in the following books but i'm pretty sure if i'd picked this up with no previous context to both this story and future ones i would've dnf'ed at some point. the only thing i truly enjoyed was claudia (the greatest to ever do it in every version) and even then a great part of what i disliked about it involved her, unfortunately. also, book louis is fucking annoying, get that white imposter out of my face. 

i'm still excited to read the vampire lestat and queen of the damned, specifically, but wow. anne rice is definitely in hell rn.

is it good? no. very trashy booktok-y fanfiction-like romance that leaves the plot in the back burner. will i read the sequel? probably. sometimes you need a bad, raunchy romance to entertain you. and it's vampire challengers, so.