Midnight Whispers

"CW: violence, gore, spice, some others<br/><br/>Thank you to the author for allowing me to be a part of the ARC team! “Midnight Whispers” is available now!<br/><br/>It’s giving cliff-notes adult Twilight, but with spice.<br/><br/>All Lillia wants to do is run the coffee shop her late father opened, enjoy spending time with her best friend, and move on past her failed engagement. When a stranger appears in her shop, the draw she feels towards him is like nothing she’s ever experienced. Vampire Finnian has no desire to turn another mortal, but Lillia’s blood sings to him like no other. Haunted by his past, Finn is helpless in the face of the growing attraction.<br/><br/>Listen, the Twilight books were a huge thing in my middle school years. I read them, I loved them, I watched all the movies. I think I even attended one of the midnight releases. It was a good time. So this book should have been a really fun read. Even the dedication points readers in the Twilight direction. Unfortunately, it seemed to just take some of the key components and deliver them at a much faster pace, so the whole thing was a bit of a miss for me.<br/><br/>I think one of my biggest issues here was that a lot of it was insta-[pick a trope]. Insta-love, insta-acceptance of the whole vampire thing, and so on. I can get down with a good insta-love or insta-lust story, but this just didn’t hit. Maybe it was that so much of it just felt like an aged-up version of the Twilight series, so it never really had a chance to establish its own ground in my mind. The characters never really got to make themselves feel unique or different, and the dynamic between the FMC and MMC didn’t resonate particularly strongly.<br/><br/>That brings me to my next issue. While some of the elements felt unique, a lot of the main plot just felt like a direct pull from the other series. Sleepy town in the middle of nowhere, a human girl just doing her thing, damaged vamp in immense need of therapy and some lessons about invasion of privacy. Even the watching her sleep, stalking behaviors ‘for her own good,’ issues with changing her into a vampire, an entire council of older-than-dirt vampires acting as the government. So much of this was just Twilight repackaged that it felt like I’d already seen it all before. I was really hoping this would be more an ‘inspired by’ thing and less of a direct reimagining. <br/><br/>All in all, it’s an easy read, especially if you’ve read the other series. There are some subtle (and not so subtle) nods to Meyer’s work included, which made for some fun Easter eggs, but it mostly just came off a little cringe for me. If you’re a major Twi-hard and love anything written in that same vein, this book could probably go either way for you. If you’ve never read or watched them but you enjoy a vampire story, you might really like this one. It just didn’t do a lot for me personally.<br/>"