So everyone kept telling me this was gonna be the next Addie LaRue. Schwab herself leans into that comp. And honestly? I wanted it to be. I was editing a video at like 2:47 AM, LED strips on that moody purple setting, and I hit play expecting sapphic vampire romantasy to absolutely wreck me. Schwab has pulled me in like this before — A Darker Shade of Magic had me in a chokehold at page one and I was fully ready for that same obsessive energy here. Twenty hours later... I have feelings. Complicated ones.
Three Voices, Three Centuries, One Messy Situationship
Let me start with what actually works because it WORKS. Having three narrators - Amandine Longeac, Charlotte Gagnor, and Lise Gillet - each anchored to their own character? Smart choice. Charlotte and Sabine's decades-long toxic love affair gets its own voice, Alice's modern-day revenge arc gets hers, and the way the audiobook physically shifts perspective through different vocal textures kept me locked in during those first ten hours. The French narration carries this poetic, almost lyrical weight that Schwab's prose demands. When Charlotte reunites with Jocelyne after literal decades apart, the way that scene is delivered - the restraint in the voice, the quiet devastation - I had to pause my editing and just sit there for a second. That hit different.
The vampire transformation scenes have this visceral hunger to them that the narrators sell with their whole chest. You can FEEL the shift from human to predator. The tension is chef's kiss when it's actually present.
The Part Where 20 Hours Started Fighting Me
But here's where I gotta be honest with y'all. This audiobook is over twenty hours long and by hour thirteen I was bumping to 2.0x just to survive. The Charlotte-Sabine relationship, which starts as this intoxicating power dynamic full of desire and control, starts looping. Same arguments. Same jealousy cycles. Same promises broken the same way. I kept waiting for Schwab to twist the knife in a new direction and instead she just... kept twisting the same one.
And Alice? The character I thought was supposed to be my entry point into this story? She gets absolutely sidelined in the second half. Like I'm sorry but you cannot open your book with a girl waking up as a vampire with zero memories and then abandon her arc for hours at a time. I was at the gym doing deadlifts getting increasingly frustrated because WHERE IS ALICE. The structure is giving nested doll - story within a story - which is cool conceptually but in practice means long stretches where the character you're most invested in just... disappears.
The ending. Oh the ending. I literally pulled out my AirPod and checked if Audible glitched because it felt like someone cut the last three chapters. All that buildup about vengeance traversing the ages and we get... that? No tension. No real payoff. For a book that asked me to commit twenty hours, I needed the ending to make me feel something devastating. Instead it just stopped.
The Spice and The Substance
Spice level is present but this isn't really a spice-driven book - it's more about the emotional hunger, the possessiveness, the way love curdles into something predatory over centuries. Which I actually respect. Schwab writes desire as a form of violence and the narrators lean into that tension beautifully. When it's working, this book explores queer love, obsession, and immortality with real teeth (pun absolutely intended). The French prose has this gorgeous rhythm that the English version probably can't fully replicate.
But twenty hours of gorgeous prose without enough plot momentum is still twenty hours. Pretty words can't save pacing problems. I've said it before and I'll say it again - life's too short for slow burns that never pay off, and this one burns SO slow in the middle that I genuinely considered DNF at chapter 3... of the Charlotte section. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is also long, also multigenerational, also about women loving women across time — and that one earned every single page because the structure kept pulling the rug out from under me.
Who Gets a Seat at This Table (And Who Doesn't)
If you're a Schwab devotee who loved the melancholy pacing of Addie LaRue and you speak French (or are learning), this audiobook is a vibe. The three-narrator setup is genuinely well done and the emotional peaks - especially that Jocelyne reunion - justify the investment. But if you need your vampire stories to actually build toward a satisfying climax? You're gonna be frustrated.
Verdict: Beautiful Bones, Hollow Center
I wanted to love this more than I did. The performances are solid, the concept is fire, and when Schwab hits an emotional beat she HITS. But twenty hours of repetitive relationship cycles with an ending that lands like a whisper when it needed to land like a scream? My algorithm is screaming at me to rate this higher because the vibes are immaculate. But vibes alone don't get you five stars on my shelf. This one's sitting at a solid 3.5 - gorgeous to listen to in pieces, exhausting as a whole.
