MINA AND THE UNDEAD by Amy McCaw – Review

I received this book for free from the Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Mina and the Undead by Amy McCaw
Published by UCLan Publishing on April 1 2021
Genres: Young adult, Horror
Pages: 299
Format: eARC
Source: Publisher
Buy on Amazon
Goodreads

The nitty-gritty: I loved the 90s/New Orleans/vampire mythology vibe, but the pacing was inconsistent and the final reveals were too over-the-top for me.

Mina and the Undead has a lot going for it: the New Orleans setting (with plenty of references to Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire), a creepy horror mansion with lots of ambiance, a lively young cast of characters, a cool 90s vibe, and some interesting family drama that added a nice extra layer to the story. Oh and I can’t forget the jaw-dropping twists around every corner! It all sounds like a recipe for success, but it didn’t quite hit the mark for me, unfortunately. This is one of those cases where a debut actually felt like a debut, with a couple of missteps that could be smoothed out with more experience. Still, I can’t deny I had a lot of fun reading this book, especially the second half which made me gasp out loud with each new twist.

After her sister Libby ditched her to go to college in New Orleans, Mina has decided to visit her and try to patch things up. Their mother mysteriously disappeared a year ago, an event that should have brought the two sisters together, but instead it ripped them apart. Now Mina is determined to reunite with Libby, and so she moves into Libby’s apartment with her two roommates, Jared and Lucas, eager to experience the delights and thrills of New Orleans firsthand. 

Mina is hoping to get a job at the Mansion of the Macabre, a horror movie “experience” tour where Libby works, but during her audition, Libby becomes curious and wanders up a dark set of stairs, only to discover the dead and bloody body of one of Libby’s coworkers. Even worse, the dead girl is clutching a ball of hair in her fist, hair that matches Libby’s and Mina’s. With everyone in the Mansion a suspect, Mina and her new friends decide to investigate on their own, and they turn up some shocking parallels to some of New Orleans’ most famous myths. Someone is murdering young women and trying to make it look like the work of a long-dead pair of brothers who terrorized the city almost sixty years ago. The Carter brothers were rumored to tie up their victims and drink their blood, but vampires aren’t real, are they? Mina is about to find out—the hard way.

Readers who are fans of vampire fiction and pop culture will really have fun with this book. McCaw is clearly a big fan herself, and she includes all sorts of fun references to things like Interview with the Vampire, The Lost Boys, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the original movie, not the TV series, which had not yet aired in 1995 when the story takes place) and more. And she’s chosen the perfect location for her story, New Orleans, which is not only the setting for the Anne Rice classic, but a city full of real life vampire myths and tourist attractions. I loved her descriptions of the gloomy mansions and mist-filled cemeteries, as well as some cool tourist traps like a bar called Empire of the Dead which has a secret backroom for those who embrace the “vampire lifestyle” and actually drink human blood!

As far as the characters go, I really liked Mina and Libby in particular, although there are so many characters in this story and unfortunately, most of them aren’t fully developed. This book is marketed as YA, probably because Mina is seventeen, but the other characters are in their early twenties, I believe. Still, the overall vibe is a YA one, and there’s even the obligatory romance between Mina and Jared, which I honestly could have done without, but hey that’s just me. I do realize I’m not the target audience when it comes to YA, so younger readers are probably going to enjoy this more than I did.

As for the plot, it was fairly uneven for me. Most of the excitement and action takes place in the second half of the book, and at that point the pacing takes off like a rocket and never stops. But the first half was pretty slow, as the story gets bogged down with too much description of the characters going from one place to another, with very little happening. I realize the author has quite a bit to set up. She has to introduce a fairly large cast of characters as well as the backstory of Libby’s and Mina’s mother, but all this running around didn’t do much to move things forward. Once Mina discovers the dead body in the Mansion, as well as another scene where one of the roommates is severely injured, the kids shuffle back and forth between the police station (because they are witnesses/suspects) and the hospital where their friend is in critical condition. This section was deadly boring, in my opinion, and the back and forth was confusing and repetitive.

I also had a hard time believing that a group of young people would be allowed to wander around crime scenes, gather their own evidence, and then turn it over to the police—and that the police would be so accepting of that. Obviously with this kind of story you are going to have to suspend your disbelief, but I’d rather leave that for the fantasy elements—vampires—and have the detective/crime solving parts feel more grounded in reality.

I did like the mystery of the sisters’ mother’s disappearance and how it caused so much friction between them. The details of her disappearance are revealed slowly over the course of the story, and I appreciated the way McCaw created tension with this slow reveal. Luckily by the end of the story we find out what happened to her—although I have to say it was done rather abruptly—and it was nice to have some family drama amidst all the murder shenanigans to balance things out.

And speaking of shenanigans, once the story hits the fifty percent mark, things get a little crazy. The last half is full of some shocking twists, and I do mean “full of,” as there seems to be a big twist at the end of every chapter. And while I had a lot of fun with the last half of the book, it was almost too much. With each new reveal, the story devolved into a comical and absurd soap opera-like fiasco that made my head spin. The ending suggests that there could be a sequel on the horizon, although just about all the mysteries are wrapped up pretty neatly. Mina and the Undead has quite a lot of five star reviews on Goodreads, so do take my review with a grain of salt. If this sounds like fun to you, definitely give it a try.

With thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy.