Poor Lucy Easting only wanted to escape her smothering mother and go to college. But no one ever expects vampires. When Lucy leaves her dorm to attend her very first college part, she meets a man whose face she can’t remember in the kitchen. She wakes up hours later, in the woods, with a big bruise on her neck. Thrall, by Rebecca Mahoney, puts a supernatural spin on the far too common story of a young woman who is attacked by a potential romantic interest. Thankfully, Lucy finds friends who can help her fight back.
Lucy’s luck–after the whole hypnotized and attacked by a vampire thing–start to turn the very next day. (Lucy has an inexplicable amount of good luck in this book, to be honest.) Her building’s RA, Mila, helps Lucy deal with an unexpected parental phone call and escorts Lucy to the health center when our protagonist gets woozy. A nurse at the clinic confirms that something is wrong with Lucy: blood loss, weirdly low blood pressure. We soon learn that Mila has a friend, Athena, knows about the “man” who is making people go missing around campus. Athena has created a late night call-in show on the university’s radio network to collect information about “our friend with the cold hands.” Lucy also has another friend on her side, Natalie, who volunteers to help because she was the one who invited Lucy to that party in the first place.
Mahoney devotes some effort into making the villain sinister, hard to locate, and mysterious, but stacks the deck a little too far in Lucy’s direction. Although Lucy is very much in the vampire’s thrall (she has to be constantly watched so that he can’t call her to him), having so many allies on her side cancels out the vampire’s primary advantage over his victims. The climax of the book is a little too easy after some decent build up. I also wasn’t enamored of the love story between Lucy and Mila. Other reviewers on Goodreads pointed out that the pair have trauma bonded more than anything else. I have to agree, especially since we only get Lucy’s perspective on their relationship.
Thrall is a fun campus read, but it’s pretty anemic1 compared to other vampire novels.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.
- I couldn’t help myself. ↩︎