There are some books you feel like you could have written yourself (under different circumstances and with talent and skill) and Thrall by Rebecca Mahoney is one of them...oh my gosh: it is so good and surprisingly creepy!
My favorite passages so far:
My mother always said I’d get eaten alive, out here in the world. Of course, every time she said it, “the world” meant a different thing. The bus stop. The crosswalk. College, eventually. When I was little, I always thought reassuring her was just a matter of proving that I was capable of navigating the wicked snares of the grocery store parking lot. But what my mother was holding on to was deeper, like it so often is. What she was afraid of was never bus stops, or crosswalks, or campuses. To her, they were all the same: a lottery wheel, always turning. And every time she or I left the house, it turned again and again.
I was never afraid of the wheel. Maybe it was the fact that she’d raised me in a layer of Bubble Wrap, but I’ve always found it romantic that there’s no real life without chance. And if all the terrible things waiting for me—in the grocery store, at the crosswalk, or here, on our campus—if all of them came down to bad luck, then that was more comforting than scary. There’s no real malice in that. Whatever could happen to me, it would never be personal.
I tried to tell her that, once. But that was never how she saw it. To her, the wheel had intention. It had teeth.
And this passage too:
Lucy was miles away from anyone who would know this about her, but there was nothing that could stun her into compliance quite like a beautiful*girl wielding a certain, effortless competence. She had, rather famously, fallen for her ex after listening to her order a sandwich.
I'm continuing to thoroughly enjoy this book and the fact that it doesn't romanticize vampirism (though I've never turned away a good vampire-ridden novel if everyone involved is doing so willingly).
The author is, at least up to where I'm at, addressing the side effects of being bitten as well as the predatory nature of a vampire (or at least, this one) and the results are chilling, both literally and figuratively.
This in the third dark academia book I've read in a row and it's interesting to see how very different it is from the other two.The isolation the main character in Thrall is experiencing is way too familiar.
(*I would like to add that 'beautiful' is relative and I'm thinking here the word could be used shallowly, but I don't think it is. I have never been overly smitten by someone just because of their looks...once you get to know someone better, their looks change sometimes...a beautiful on the outside person can show they are not so much that way inside and someone who is unconventionally attractive can outshine everyone else in the room. I will say, though, that I can be easily overwhelmed by someone I find attractive and want to bolt out of the room like the character Nate in the first episode of Ted Lasso when he encounters Hannah Waddingham's character).
