Blog Tour Review: Summer Vamp by Violet Chan Karim

Hello, friends. ✨ Today I’m excited to be part of the blog tour for Summer Vamp by Violet Chan Karim! Special thanks to the TBR & Beyond Tours team for organising the tour and including me in it.

Thanks to Random House Graphic for providing a digital ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Click here or on the banner above to check out the rest of the fantastic bloggers on tour!

Summer Vamp
Publisher: Random House Graphic
Publication Date: 14 May 2024
Genre: Middle-Grade Fantasy

Panda Rating:

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📖 SYNOPSIS

What happens when a very human kid ends up at the wrong summer camp—FOR VAMPIRES?! This quirky and heart warming graphic novel about making friends and getting in trouble is perfect for fans of Witches of Brooklyn.

After a lackluster school year, Maya anticipates an even more disappointing summer. The only thing she’s looking forward to is cooking and mixing ingredients in the kitchen, which these days brings her more joy than mingling with her peers… that is until her dad’s girlfriend registers her for culinary summer camp! Maya’s summer is saved!… or not.

What was meant to be a summer filled with baking pastries and cooking pasta is suddenly looking a lot… paler?! Why do all of the kids have pointy fangs? And hate garlic? Turns out that Maya isn’t at culinary camp—she’s at a camp for VAMPIRES! Maya has a lot to learn if she’s going to survive this summer… and if she’s lucky, she might even make some friends along the way.

📚 BUY A COPY!

What happens when you realize you haven’t gone to culinary camp and ended up at not just any regular old summer camp, but a camp for vampires?! Well, it turns out you can have a whole lot of fun in the last place you’d expect to! 😂

Maya is a young girl who struggles to make friends and is unable to speak her mind out of fear of being judged by others. After a big life-changing announcement from her father and his girlfriend, she gets treated to the summer camp of her dreams: culinary camp. Only, she ends up somewhere completely different and she’s terrified about it! But what starts as an awkward summer of having to pretend she’s not human ends up being an unforgettable summer spent making the best friends with the most unlikely cabin mates.

It was great to see Maya find her voice and learn to speak up for herself but to also see her be comfortable with showing who she is and what she loves. The friendship group she makes with Alex, Daisy and Nico is so sweet and wholesome, even if it started on the wrong foot with Alex especially. There was even an adorkably cute vampire boy who developed the most awkward summer crush on Maya! 🤭 Even though the themes are ones typically found in all middle-grade stories, I found the combination of the summer camp setting and pre-teen/teen vampires was a fun and fresh way to bring the message across. Growing up problems are truly universal and it doesn’t matter whether you’re human or a vampire, you’ll find people who may be going through the same thing as you and you’ll always find your people.

I also really enjoyed the art style and colour palette because it was adorable and gave the book such a great summery vibe. Overall, this was such a fun and heartwarming graphic novel that would make the perfect summer beach (or camp!) read for readers of all ages, but especially the young ones. Highly recommend it!

Violet Chan Karim is a comic artist and writer from Boston, Massachusetts. Her love for cartoons, books, and movies as a child led to her pursuing a career in writing and illustration as an adult. She graduated with a BFA in Sequential Art from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2020. Violet’s debut graphic novel, Summer Vamp, will be published in 2024 with Random House Graphic. She also creates the webcomic, Death of a Pop Star, with Webtoon.

Author’s socials:
Twitter | Instagram | Goodreads