Review; Blood Born by Renee Lake

Earlier this year I recieved an ARC of the novel Blood Born by Renee Lake through Netgalley. I read it shortly afterwards and today I'll post my review.

Description from Goodreads
Maddie is excited about the new adventures college life will bring. She dreams of rallies, weird roommates and exciting courses of study.

She's living with her girlfriend and making new interesting friends while watching out for her terminally ill brother.

What she doesn't expect is mystery, tragedy, and heartbreak to befall her within the first semester.

Is there a monster preying upon the people at her college?

Will she betray her friends and succumb to temptation?

Can they band together and fight the darkness?

Or is the darkness that surrounds her not the enemy...but her only ally?

Trigger Warnings: description of sexual assault, swearing, murder, alcohol, sex, and a professor/student relationship

My Thoughts on the Book
I really wanted to love this book. An LGBTQIA+ retelling of Dracula? Sounds awesome. In reality? Well, for the most part the characters were a bit overkill (no pun intended) one-dimensional and there were quite a few times I wanted to slap several of the characters in the face because of their stupidity. There were also uneven character development, if at all, and the writing style was a bit too bland, flat and boring. And don't even get me started on the love triangle between Jo, Maggie and Valora (even though it to a certain extent mimicks the original novel, though Mina knew all along Dracula was the bad guy and she wasn't into him at all). The book is also labeled "horror", but the horror was lacking. It was more one of the spooky tales that Queenie could have told around the campfire.

Now, I might add that I did actually like the genderbending and the LGBTQIA+ theme (especially being bi and getting comments about being indecisive). In addition, if one has read the original, Bram Stoker's Dracula, one can notice certain familiarity when it comes to some of the characters, as well as scenes and story-line. Oddly enough, I also liked Valora Dulcara a bit, even if she had some crappy character traits.

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