When Life Gives You Vampires

By Gloria Duke. Pub date 10/4/2022

4*s. Best enjoyed when you’re luscious and very much non undead…or you are. Either way, you’ll like it.

PUBLISHER’S SYNOPSIS

“A paranormal Dumplin’ for adults, When Life Gives You Vampires is part a journey of body positivity, part a story about learning how to accept love at face value, and part a hysterical romcom told through a paranormal lens.

Twenty-five year old Lily Baines is used to waking up hungover, overweight, and underemployed. Waking up with fangs? Not so much. But when it turns out a little light necking has more serious consequences than she ever imagined, Lily’s determined to get to the bottom of it.

Tristan hadn’t meant to turn Lily-it’s against vampire law-but now that she’s here, they need to team up to save their hides. They strike a truce, fending off other vampires, Lily’s work-rival-turned-slayer, and her mother’s tone-deaf romance and fitness advice-all while Lily faces down her insecurities about the fact that she lives in a diet-obsessed world with a body that will never age, never die, and never change. Can she learn to love the (plus size) woman she’ll be forever more?”

REVIEW

I’m not going to lie. As a luscious lady myself, I’ve often thought of how becoming Undead would affect my mindset on how I feel about my body. I honestly love that Gloria Duke wrote an entire book about it, because as much as I’ve thought about it I’ve never really talked to anyone about it. It for sure felt like I was doing that while reading this, and she said ALL the things I was thinking. It’s hard to live in a plus sized body as it is, but a plus sized body forever? 

Honestly, the things that we worry about when it comes to having a plus sized body go beyond just acceptance to our health. But if we’re undead, what’s the honest to the gods reasons for worrying about it and not accepting it? I loved the journey that Lily went on throughout this book. Finding love not only externally but internally, and accepting her new strength and resilience. Not only that, but also realizing that the same judgements she held for herself were just as true of those with more societally accepted bodies. Women are just made to feel like crap for what we look like, undead or otherwise. 

All that said, the romance felt super pure, and the adventure that came along with it was all the more amazing. Lily is a total badass, and no one in the undead set really used her looks against her, which put a real warm and fuzzy vibe in my very un-undead heart. 

Thank you to Netgalley and Sourcebooks Casablanca for this amazing book. I really appreciated the way this material was handled. It’s honest but far from impartial.