Although it’s well written, capturing the mood and language of it’s era, this book failed to really grab me. It follows the lives of a brother and sister, James and Charlotte, who have no one in the world except each other, until time and social circumstances pull them apart. But when something supernatural happens that changes James forever, Charlotte will go to any lengths to help her brother and keep him from the clutches of the Aegolius Club.

There are some nice references to literature like Bram Stokers Dracula in parts that are epistolary. And the author clearly knows her era, but in Charlotte we see an anachronistic woman, allowed independence she never could have had, and the story is very slow in it’s pace, switching to different styles and protagonists. It lacks drama and pace, but there are some good scenes here, and I think it will find it’s audience, though vampire fans will feel it’s lacking a kind of romance and seductiveness.

Read It If: you liked Mary Shelleys’s Frankenstein or Stokers Dracula, it has a lot of the same pacing and sense of seeing humanity through a different lens, as well as the slowness.