Son Of Vlad

2.5 (rly wishing for half star ratings bc I'm extra)

What I liked:
The spooky vibes (not scary, but very spooky season vibes and I loved it)

It felt cozy! The stakes were never high enough for my anxiety to spike, but the spooky vibes were still there! A very fine balance.

It was a super quick read! I read it in (almost) one sitting (unfortunately I had other priorities that dragged me away :/ )


What I disliked:
The characters felt rushed, and 2 dimensional. I don't feel like I know them very well, and I'm a sucker for deep character arcs.
Unfortunately I felt like the characters were just there to have things happen. They never truly reacted- they found out new information and then moved on. I never felt emotion from them, I was just told how they felt (I know writing emotions is difficult, but I need to be able to feel what the characters are feeling in the moment, and I never felt like the characters were actually feeling emotions in general.)

I didn't like the dialogue. I didn't feel like people would actually speak like that, even for the time it was set in. I could totally be wrong, I'm not very well versed in the speech of the time haha. But reading the dialogue felt clunky to me, and I had a hard time imagining the characters actually saying what was written.

Overall, the characters were the downfall of this book for me. I love deep character based stories, and I definitely see what the author was going for! The vision is there. I just didn't think the characters were very developed, nor did their emotions ever resonate with me as a reader.


Other notes:
Im curious how old Cristian is? I think somewhere in the book it said he was 3 years old, but Luca had been out of VI's life for 5 years? I'd like a paternity test