Mari is a young woman on the streets of New York City. Miercurea is the vampire whose eye she has caught. The first several chapters lay out the groundwork of the bad relationship Mari stays in, and the evil-smelling tenement basement that Miercurea uses as a hideout. They go through the inevitable “vampire glimpse Mari and is awakened” scene, and the “Mari is turned into a vampire scene” with the same language and tone you’re used to, and have been used to, since Anne Rice penned her Vampire Chronicles. 

However, once you get to Book II around page 37, the novel changes and becomes a truly lovely and original fairy tale that explores and challenges traditional vampire lore along with its Hungarian and Romanian roots. The Mirror itself becomes a vastly important character in the lives of a young medieval woman named Eva and a local nobleman named Avar, who have somehow promised a strong source of magic to retrieve a magic sword from Avar’s very stingy father. Desperate to reunite the sword with the mirror, Avar and Eva accidentally unleash a new magic so hideous and powerful that it threatens to destroy their country and even all of humanity. It isn’t until their son, Miercurea, reawakens it that he too becomes part of the vampire legend and carries it into modern times.

But how does this relate to Mari? Instead of being a sideline object of affection so overused for female characters in vampire fiction (think of Mina Harker) Mari is actually a key to the entire mystery and herself, as a vampire, may be the only one to cure the curse of vampirism for her and Miercurea.