A vampire who has seen so much destruction in the world having lived in Europe and Egypt for 200 years in the company of Roma, Jews, and Arabs who she loved, must face her nihilism when strange parents enroll their equally strange child into the upstate NY private school she runs.

At the end of the day, it's about grief and choosing to live through immense pain. And in a weird way, the moral ambiguity of bringing a child into a painful world. It dealt deftly with themes of abuse, abandonment, loss, genocide, destruction and new beginnings. It was actually kind of fascinating from a thematic perspective. The prose was well written and compelling as were the characters.
 

My only issue is that occasionally the narrative felt repetitive. And it also toggled back and forth between Europe and Egypt from the 1800s-1945, and 1984 New York and the two timelines didn't always feel connected. So I kept on finding myself needing to 'get back into it' every time we switched between time periods.

But overall, I definitely liked it a lot and there's a lot in here that was quite fascinating. And it did have a 15/10 ending.