REVIEW • Elton Irving Must Die (The Lost Girls by Sonia Hartl)

Getting over Your Vampire Ex is as Easy as Killing Him and Stealing His Girlfriend

Holly Liddell has been stuck with crimped hair since 1987 when she agreed to let her boyfriend, Elton, turn her into a vampire. But when he ditches her at a gas station a few decades into their eternity together, she realizes that being young forever actually means working graveyard shifts at Taco Bell, sleeping in seedy motels, and being supernaturally compelled to follow your ex from town to town—at least until Holly meets Elton’s other exes.

It seems that Holly isn’t the only girl Elton seduced into this wretched existence. He turned Ida in 1921, then Rose in 1954, and he abandoned them both before Holly was even born. Now Rose and Ida want to kill him before he can trick another girl into eternal adolescence, and they’ll need Holly’s help to do it. And once Holly starts falling for Elton’s vulnerable new conquest, Parker, she’ll do anything to save her.

To kill Elton for good, Holly and her friends will have to dig up their pasts, rob a bank, and reconcile with the people they’ve hurt in their search for eternal love. And to win the girl, Holly will have to convince Parker that she’s more than just Elton’s crazy ex—even though she is trying to kill him.

myreview

I received this book for free from Page Street Kids for review consideration. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

First sentence: “Welcome to Taco Bell. Order when ready.”

When your vampire ex breaks up with you and tries to turn other teenage girls, it’s time for him to die.

Immortality sucks when you’re a sixteen year old vampire trying to get over your shitty ex and working at Taco Bell to make ends meet. It isn’t the fairytale ending that Holly Liddell envisioned when Elton Irving promised her eternal love. But here she is now with forever ‘80s crimped hair, nursing a broken heart. And when she meets Rose and Ida—two girls who had also been turned and discarded decades ago—well, Elton’s gotta die.

Forget all the things movies tell you about vampires. Things you usually associate with vampires—burning in the sun, a stake through the heart being enough to kill them—isn’t true in The Lost Girls. The vampires in here are a bit different, especially the way they turn humans into vampires and how you can kill them. I enjoyed how vampires are presented here since it’s refreshing to see new mechanics. Also, I like how this book emphasizes how depressing it is to be a vampire—they can’t simply roam on their own volition.

Prepare to hate Elton Irving. Elton deserves every bad thing to happen to him. When you’re an infatuated teenager, you don’t see the problems that everybody else sees. For Holly, when that veil is uncovered from her eyes via a breakup after 30 years together, she sees Elton for the manipulative, gaslighting self-centered POS asshole that he is. The way he talked to Holly filled me with a lot of anger; I knew somebody like that, and it’s hard not to see myself or my loved ones who experienced that in Holly’s shoes.

Sapphic ftw. That’s right! Girl falls in love with girl. And in this case, Holly falls for the one person she’s trying to protect from Elton. She can’t help but see herself in Parker, the girl that Elton’s after, and as she gets to know Parker, things get complicated.

I didn’t enjoy the romance—partially because Parker had no personality whatsoever. I couldn’t tell you something that is uniquely Parker. She was interchangeable with Holly—they had similar personalities and home life situations (which I know that most compatible couples are the ones who are similar to each other, but not great in a book when everybody should be kind of uniquely different).

You get a found family in this revenge plot. Everybody knows I’m a sucker for found families, and that is what shined for me in The Lost Girls. Revenge is a good way to bring people together, especially scorned vampire exes who share the same sire. The way Holly, Ida, and Rose can be free of Elton is to get rid of him, and thus begins their revenge plot to kill Elton Irving exactly like John Tucker Must Die. It’s fantastic seeing girls come together to take down a common enemy in the form of an ex. It’s funny that the only good thing about Elton is that he brought these girls together, and look at them now.

Also, I loved seeing Holly reconnect with her best friend Stacy. I needed more of them kicking ass together.

It gets incredibly slow. Unfortunately this book gets incredibly slow halfway through, and I lost interest towards the end.

Should you read The Lost Girls? Eh, maybe? It does something good with the way it introduces new ideas to the vampire lore, but the story lacked excitement as you got to the end.