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Well, this was the dumbest shit I’ve read in quite a while.

I picked it up thinking it would be some good escapist fantasy book with some romance thrown in but it turned out to be Twilight meets Instagram. We had some vampires, demons, and witches but they never did anything remotely interesting. It was all about yoga, fitness routines, early morning runs, elaborate and photogenic meals, wine drunk in old chateaus, cosy interiors and, I swear to you, there was a scene where the heroine drew her knees up and held a mug of hot beverage with both hands. This is something you only ever do if are posing for Instagram or pretending you’re in the Marks&Spencer Christmas ad.

There were 600 pages of this nonsense and whatever action or danger did occur it was swiftly dealt within 5 pages so we could go back to characters having some idiotic conversations where they constantly quibbled over nothing in particular. The narrative switches between the first person from the heroine’s point of view and the omniscient third person to explain all the things the heroine couldn’t know about. The whole thing is very lazily executed and there is no change in the voice at all, so I constantly had to keep checking which narrative it is when I thought the heroine fainted but somehow she is still talking.

When our witch heroine met the vampire hero she still had brains and I was hoping she would put an end to his brand of romance which included gaslighting the heroine, controlling her every move, ordering her about, infantilising her and all the other techniques overbearing assholes like him like to employ. It would be like Twilight The Remix. Sadly it was just Twilight The Extended Cut. Diana quickly lost all the brains that she had and also seemingly some of her size. When we meet her she is a tall and athletic woman, but as soon as she falls in love with Matthew she becomes pocket-sized. He constantly scoops her up and carries her about (in his pocket I assume). Every now and then she tries rebel against his constant ordering her about but it’s always presented like a silly childish tantrum and we are to assume she is being foolish for protesting such thoughtful commands.

Due to his vampire abilities Matthew knows everything about her �� when she is sleepy, tired, hungry, when she is on her period. And he orders her to sleep, eat etc. Because in her twenty odd years she clearly hasn’t mastered dealing with basic body functions. That fucking guy even buys her birth control pills and orders her to take them, even tells her what day she should take them (he does know those things better, of course). And check this, he also refuses to have sex with her for no fucking reason whatsoever. Here, honey , take loads of hormones with a bunch of side effects, because who knows how powerful my seed is, maybe I can impregnate you just by thinking about it. What in the puritanical hell is that? And that is AFTER they were married, which brings me to the clusterfuck that was their ‘wedding�� (?). What happened was he went on some trip, came back, kissed her and told her he loved her. She is like ‘cool beans��. And then he says: “oh, by the way, in the vampire culture that thing means we are now married and mated for life��.

Is she mad as fuck that dude tricked her into marrying him, literally married her without even asking if this is something she might be interested in? No, of course not, that’s not weird and creepy at all. Supa romantic. That halfwit of a heroine embraces it and goes on to call all the people he has turned into vampires over the years, some of whom are a few centuries old, “OUR children��. She literally met that dude a few weeks before and now she is calling his three-hundred-year-old “son�� �� MY son. Sure, go hard or go home.

Also, another thing we are supposed to find romantic is that whole alpha-maleness and ‘pack animal behaviour��. All the men never stop acting idiotically protective over “their women�� and growl at each other for no logical reason. It is supposed to show us they are all alpha males fighting for dominance. Wow. How exciting. You’re basically dating a German shepherd. We are told that Matthew the vampire is endlessly brilliant and eternally patient, but he acts neither. He withholds information from the heroine for no reason other than to be controlling, he acts rashly, he can barely control his anger fits and basically has an emotional complexity of a fighting dog. Whatta man, whatta man, whatta man.

Oh, and did I mention all the characters smell of flowers, spices and minerals that no mammal has any business smelling of? And why is a man smelling of cloves and cinnamon sexy? Are we supposed to shag him or sprinkle him over a latte?

AND ALSO. Tiny bit of advice from me for Diana �� if someone gives you a bunch of ingredients and very strict instructions how to make them into some tea, and tells you to make it exactly like that every day, and drink it at the same time every day, then maybe don’t it because it’s hella fishy. Or at least, I don’t know, ask why, you absolute nincompoop!

I am not reading another instalment of this bloated abomination. I heard the characters are going back in time. They should go back to the Middle Ages where they belong and then die from the plague.