"I stared into the flames as they resurrected images and memories from my first days with him in this very room so many lifetimes ago. There is no explanation for love; no spoken words compare with its silent exhilaration. If that was true of the ordinary love between two mortals - if love is ever ordinary - then it was truer of a love that has contorted itself into different bodies in different eras over the centuries." ...Mina Murray
Dracula in Love by Karen Essex is seductive. It is the telling of a love story that had endured centuries, the love story between Count Dracula and Mina Murray, and part of that story is Count Dracula's rich history and how he became immortal. Karen Essex's prose is beautiful, draping itself around you and slowly drawing you in. Dracula in Love is erotic and passionate, and everything you'd want in a gothic love story. It's haunting, it's wonderful and I LOVED it!
In the original story by Bram Stoker, Dracula was everything that embodied evil, a blood sucking monster who almost destroyed the lives of a young naive lawyer he had hired, Jonathan Harker, and Harker's "prim & proper" fiance & soon to be wife, Mina Murray. Dracula's ultimate seduction of Mina was an act of revenge. But in Dracula in Love, the story of Dracula is told through Mina's eyes, with a backstory that has Dracula as Mina's soulmate, with a power over her that 700 years of yearning could not break. Even as she marries Jonathan Harker, she is drawn to him... in vivid erotic dreams she shares herself with the mysterious man she later knows to be Dracula. Her seduction is far from undesired, as the stirred memories of her past life with Dracula slowly open up a world that her victorian sensibilities should reject, but instead draw her even farther into the arms of Dracula.
Walk the dark, damp streets of Victorian England... Listen to the faint whispers of the night... watch out for the unnatural ones called vampires... OK, just read it! Karen Essex does an amazing job of creating a handsome, brooding, passionate Dracula any girl would love to invite in for a bite. And Mina is the ultimate heroine at first gentle and bound by the Victorian morals imposed on women of the time, but whose strong will and determination give her the strength to become so much more. And as if the love story weren't enough to satisfy any reader, Karen does a wonderful job of painting a true portrait of the women of the late 19th century, and what their place in society was. If walking the dark streets of Victorian England appeal to you, if a brooding handsome seductive vampire makes your knees weak, and if you love a girl who knows her own mind you will enjoy Dracula in Love! I was so fortunate to receive an ARC of Dracula in Love from Doubleday! Now I'm going to have to check out the other books Karen Essex has written because her writing in Dracula in Love was just so beautiful I want to read more.
Mark your calendars for August 10th, because that's when Dracula in Love will be coming to a bookstore near you!
*Hey, I'm sharing this with Cym Lowell's Book Review Party!
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