** I WAS GIVEN THIS BOOK FOR MY READING PLEASURE ** 

 Copy received through Netgalley 

 ~ 

 Young Gothic, Young Gothic, 01 

 by M.A Bennett 

★☆☆☆☆ 

 427 Pages 

 multi-character POV 

 Content Warning: child loss, abortion, sexual coercion 

 DNF'd at 9% 

 The concept behind this book was utter brilliance – recreating that magical time in history when Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, John Polidori and Lord Byron gathered in one place and came away with the famous conceptual plots for Frankenstein and the Vampyre. 

 Sadly, it felt like the author agreed and wrote the book with that self-satisfied undercurrent of 'look what a great idea I created'. It really put me off, especially when the plot and characters couldn't live up to the promise of the concept. 

 I was surprised that this was billed as Teens & YA by the Hachette Children's Group, yet it contained the heavy triggers of abortion and sexual coercion. However, I can't comment on those because I didn't make it far enough into the book to come across them. 

 For me, the characters – a collection of 'bright and brilliant' creatives – were extremely unlikeable and overly pretentious with holier-than-thou attitudes. All of the characters were trying to be too relevant, using words like 'hench' and 'peng' – which, full disclosure, I have NEVER heard/seen before! – and yet they all failed to be even remotely relatable to real-life teens or creatives. 

 Strangely, the author put a lot of effort into the slang used by the teens, yet there were frequent grammar issues, like “if there would be a point” instead of “any point” and “my eyes are on stalks”. I have no idea if this was another choice made for the characters sakes, to somehow display their creative minds or their personalities, but it really rubbed me up the wrong way. 

 Honestly, it feels like the author wrote a homage to horror movies and literature, and only decided to make it YA to take advantage of the popularity of that market right now, because it felt VERY much like it was written as an adult novel. It had hints of the 90's movie The Haunting. The characters all had egos and reputations – like the viral BookTuber and Brit Award attending rapper – of adults. These did NOT feel like teenagers, in any way. Eve was a stereotypical goth girl, G the Poet was a stereotypical rapper, and Ren was a stereotypical gay teen with a flair for the DRAMATIC and OH MY GOD caps thought processes, to the point where I just rolled my eyes and gave up. 

 Again – full disclosure – I have been that teenage girl with a death sentence hanging over her head, having had cancer at 15 – and I REALLY disliked Eve and her attitude towards her own illness. I know everyone has a different experience of life-changing, terminal situations, and when you survive it leaves you with a shadow, but the way Eve acted, and insisting that she'd 'died' in some way, was frustrating to read and not the kind of message that I'd like to see in YA novels, for teenagers who might go through similar experiences. It doesn't leave a good impression or provide hope. More than that, I felt that Eve especially couldn't just explain or introduce herself, she had to somehow out-do everyone else, to prove that she wasn't just one-dimensional – even though she really was! – and wanted to make it quite clear that she was more than she appeared all the time. It got tiring, even only in the 9% I read. 

 While I do enjoy a good gothic story, Young Gothic mostly drools over anything gothic or horror rather than trying to be something new and individual or clever. There were SO MANY opportunities to take the story in a new and interesting direction, but it clung so tightly to what came before that it never gave itself room to breathe. It relied far too heavily on the past – trying (and failing, IMO) to imitate the Dracula epistolary concept in the first chapter – but it didn't actually COMMIT to any of the many directions it drifted towards. If it had just picked ONE direction and stuck to it, it probably would have been far more successful. 

 In the end, the story and characters didn't capture my interest at all. It was a cheesy horror movie from the late 90s that never quite reached the potential of the original concept. I didn't care where it went, what happened next, or if the characters grew out of their petty competitive clash of egos, because I didn't like any of the characters or connect to them. 

 Unfortunately, I think people will rave about this book because it feeds into all the currently popular tropes in YA horror fiction at the moment. Sadly, this just wasn't enough for me. I wanted something NEW and interesting, something that took what came before and BUILT on it. I wanted it to take the original concept, twist it, mould it, and make it into something smart and clever. 

 Overall, I'm really disappointed. The concept had a lot of promise, but it relied too much on that concept and just didn't even try to reach its full potential.