My letter “Y” pick for the A to Z Book Challenge was YOUNGBLOOD By Sasha Laurens. I expected to like this one a whole lot more than I did. Vampire boarding school? One vamp girl from a lower class family and one from a prominent and wealthy vampire family? Sapphic romance? I was so ready to rip into this one. And while the plot had a lot of intrigue involving long-concealed secrets in the boarding school archives, a vampire community forced to rely on synthetic blood for food, and past drama between the two main characters, Kat and Taylor’s relationship just didn’t evolve in a satisfactory way for me.

The story relied way too much on the old miscommunication trope for friction in the building of the love story and all it did was drag the story down for me. Kat and Taylor had enough going on in the school and the cleverly built vampire world that could have impacted their relationship in deeper and more interesting ways rather than relying on a series of misunderstandings between them for the two to fight through. Laurens weaves an intricate plot and builds a dark, mysterious world that I loved to explore – I honestly wish this had been a series of books instead of a stand-alone. Still, it wasn’t enough for me to love it. Good book, not a great book. Three stars.