It’s been some time, Curious One. A long time since I’ve sat down and read a book… I found this series, I’m positive you’ve heard of it before, and I said to myself “use this to get back into Time for a Book!” So, here I am, craving to get back into it!
…It’s finally time for a book…
I genuinely thought this series was much older than it is, thinking it was started in like 2015. However, apparently, the first novel was published in 2020… Who knew?! It caught massive amounts of attention rapidly. Like the Twilight series, pretty much every YA reader and Fantasy readers alike had tried reading it. Because of that, I of course did my best to stay away from it.
A Good Deal on a Popular Series
With books that are massively loved by YA readers, (and I mean MASSIVELY LOVED) I tend to find them difficult to read for a handful of reasons, the two biggest reasons tend to either be the writing style of the author that I just cannot get myself to enjoy, or the pacing of the books are too ridden with hidden messages, repetitive tropes, and hints from the characters that aren’t as developed as they should be at the start; so I’m bored with having to decipher whether the bully just said something I’m going to need to remember later on.
Alas, when you find a six-book completed series for $30 and each book had 500+ pages, you shouldn’t look the gift horse in the mouth and turn it away. So, here we are! Let’s delve into Crave, book one of the Crave Series by Tracy Wolff.
Yup, you just read that right, Curious One… Crave by Tracy Wolff…
To officially begin, I literally just finished the last page maybe 20 minutes ago. I ended up having to split the book between two days, because wow. I sat back to take a break and realized I was on page 228. The book had only covered the protagonists first five days. Yes, the first five days only and sitting prettily at just under half-way through the book this protagonist has gone through a ton of traumatic things, yet we have learned like… nothing?
Backtracking to the Start!
Let me backtrack a bit…
Grace, our main protagonist, is moving to the wilderness of Alaska. Her parents died in a car accident and her only remaining relatives are an uncle and a cousin. The uncle is the headmaster of an elite prep-school (Katmere Academy) in Alaska. Her cousin is only a year younger than her. So, she’s forced to upend her already upended life in California and move to Alaska.
The way she acts, I kind of pegged her as like 16-17, which would make her a sophomore or junior in high school, right? Well, she’s actually a senior. She seems both mature and naive for her supposed age. I was convinced she was a sophomore until it states otherwise. I’m sure some of the naivety is because of her traumatic loss, so I can’t really judge her for being a bit aloof when she’s trying constantly not to cry or make a fool of herself and filled with PTSD, but that’s part of the problem too. She came from California. San Diego, to be exact, as a senior in a state full of sun and fun and narcissism, surely, she’s dealt with bullies and new schools and cliques and all that jazz before Katmere.
So, I’m a bit at a loss as to why it’s such a big deal in the book for her to not make a fool out of herself. She’s got this whole, “I don’t care, but I care” kind of attitude. It’s a bit unnecessary of an arc to be dealing with on top of trying to decipher what kind of bizarre world she’s just entered.
Craving Legacies
She almost immediately realized that something is a bit off with the students there. It makes a big deal about watching a T.V. show called Legacies, which as a vampire book and if you’re reading this, I’m sure as the Curious One you are, you’ve watched or at least heard of the Vampire Diaries spinoff Legacies.
Yet, it kind of goes nowhere. It’s a great segue that could have given her the chance to be a little bit of a detective if she had just thought about her surroundings a bit more. Not to mention it was a big deal that her and her cousin Macy started the series over so Macy could be brought up to speed on what was happening in the series. And come on… the series literally deals with dragons in the first episode, plus vampires, plus wolf shifters, plus witches, plus a headmaster that feels a lot like her uncle being the fatherly figure all the creatures need.
This irony is not lost to me. However, it was so lightly brushed, that it truly ended up being superfluous. I’m obviously questioning why it took up some space in an already oddly timed out book.
A Deal Is a Deal, and I’ll Crave a Deal!
Before I continue, I feel the need to clarify. I did not read the back of the book(s) or know exactly what these books were/are about. I just knew they were insanely popular, and I couldn’t turn down a 6-book series for $30. With that said, though, just from the cover of Crave, it’s obvious that it’s going to involve vampires. How could it not when the cover is black with a white flower and blood is dripping off the “V” in Crave onto said white flower… pretty obvious, right?
Yet, I pause now to read the flap of the book. Ummm… I’m slightly caught off guard. The flap makes it sound like Grace knew the whole time that she entered an academy full of supernatural beings as the only human PLUS suspecting she was brought to the academy on purpose, hinting that her parents’ car accident wasn’t really an accident. Which, if you’ve read these, you already know that it wasn’t. I just wanted to get that off my chest, because it’s now distracted me. It has made me a little confused why it took her so long to come to this conclusion. Page 313 to be exact. Which is over halfway read by this point. …Just saying…
I will say that me as a reader not knowing EXACTLY what supernatural creatures are inside these pages and who and which shifter(s) groups are included in this series except for vampires, was kind of fun. I had a chance to take some guesses throughout the book, trying to clue in along with Grace. That was a nice change for me.
Do You Crave a Mess, Curious One?
The first 320 pages of this book are a bit of a mess. Actually, kind of the whole book is a mess. For the first 526 pages (the book is 577) Grace has only been at the Katmere Academy for maybe a week? Give or take a few days. There at the end she was in the hospital for a few days after fighting off a vampire (because humans can totally do that, by the way). At this point I’m not 100% sure how long she’s had her feet on the ground in Alaska. Maybe two weeks, tops!
In this time, she moves to Alaska:
- is sick with altitude sickness for a couple days
- feels better
- gets sick again after drinking some tea (but everyone attributes it to altitude sickness still)
- sprains her ankle falling out of a tree because of wind
- has a snowball fight
- explores a library full of stickers and gargoyles
- meets Jaxon who is “hot and forbidden”
- falls in love with Jaxon
- goes to a party for 10 minutes
- reconnects with her cousin
- almost gets crushed by a chandelier
- almost dies in an “earthquake” tremor
- almost gets pushed outside at night by two guys who clearly want to kill her by freezing her to death
- and almost gets killed as a sacrifice by a vampire student trying to bring back her boyfriend who is also Jaxon’s brother who Jaxon actually killed to protect the rest of the world from his genocidal ideations.
Big Deal, Small Presentation
The fact that Jaxon killed his brother was something that seemed crazy big. It was revealed in a slightly dismissive way. It’s was like “oh, I killed my brother and I feel guilty for it. Not because I’m guilty for doing it. I feel guilty that I would do it again to save the world.” So, Hudson (Jaxon’s older brother) was a psychopathic, power-hungry vampire who wanted to kill everyone and everything except for the vampires who were born vampires. The born vampires are more powerful than those who were made. Which is why he also wanted to kill the made vampires. But this also includes all the witches and shifters and even humans, I’m sure.
So, to literally “save the world” Jaxon killed his brother. Jaxon also lets out that his parents are like… really bad people too and that they essentially crafted and poisoned his brother to the point that Jaxon couldn’t reach him. Or bad vampires I mean. His mother, the queen, is the one who gave him the scar he is so embarrassed about Grace touching all the time.
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Missing Something
Anyways, it’s something that I think would have been touched on a bit more than it was. Of course, we all know there will be more to that story that is revealed later on, but for now, it left a massive gap in my mind about what exactly is happening here. Not to mention that the distrust that was already sort of there has been amplified to a war-like level between the species. We see that amplification hit hardest when we realize that Jaxon, Flint and Lia (the psycho vamp who wants to kill Grace) were all super close and best friends.
The last four pages are kind of an epilogue where we see it from Jaxon’s point of view and he’s yelling at Grace’s uncle because Grace turned into a gargoyle, I guess? I’m not sure where that came from, it came way out of left field, but it explains why she’s so important I guess to have been the only one who could be the sacrifice to bring Hudson back from the dead? And some random vampire girl who was dating Hudson just happened to know she was a gargoyle and was capable of finding her and kill her parents too.
Not sure how, but I’m sure book two will explain it, right?!
Craving Context through Perspective
Also, I’m not sure if every copy has this, but at the end of the book we get a glimpse into Jaxon’s perspective for three chapters. There were some good chapters to get his perspective. It does change quite a bit in the tone and attitude you feel towards Jaxon. However, I’m not convinced that this is all to be taken at face value. Especially the final chapter we are given. But I get ahead of myself…
The first chapter we get from Jaxon’s perspective is when he first sees and meets Grace as she’s coming in from the snowmobile ride to get to the school and as she’s waiting for her cousin and uncle to come back to take her to her room. Jaxon walks up to her. As soon as he see’s her he’s like… transfixed and is immediately all “she’s my mate”. It’s odd to me, because when he saw her coming in on the snowmobile, he was prepared to use her as bait to figure out why stuff is happening around the school. So, it’s like, if she was his mate, he would’ve had that feeling when he saw her outside. Yet he had to be like an inch from her before he made the connection?
We also get his perspective on how she catches him off guard and throws him for a loop. He says something along the lines of “no one treats me that way and never has before” but how would she know she’s treating him any different than any other person who is being confronted by a douche? I’m suspicious of the entire scene. But maybe I’m reading to much into it!
Perspective Matters in Crave!
The second scene is when Grace falls out of the tree. We see it from Jaxon’s perspective and so we see how it really happened. That a dragon shifter created the wind and directed it at Grace, so she’d fall and break the branch and fall and hopefully die. From Grace’s perspective, we thought that Flint (the second love interest for Grace) was able to sort of catch her and be her landing pad so she didn’t get injured. However, now we know that Jaxon was able to literally move Flint with his mind and forced him to brace for her impact. Who knew vampires also had superpowers in this book!!! However, Jaxon can move the Earth (yes, literally) and now has telekinetic abilities. Kind of cool…
The final chapter we get is so random.
I feel like it’s going to play a big part in the rest of the series somehow. So, Jaxon hurt Grace by accident, and he’s determined to un-mate them. I’m a little confused, because they’re not even “bonded” yet, to my knowledge, Grace hasn’t even been informed that she’s the mate to Jaxon. However, Jaxon wants nothing to do with her. He goes to the “Bloodletter” who seems to have been a guardian of sorts for Jaxon, training him how to control his powers. Jaxon went to the Bloodletter to get instructions on how to break their mate-bond.
The Bloodletter Warning
The Bloodletter says “No” and then proceeds to give him the instructions anyways with a warning about how when it’s done, it’s done. There is no going back. Which, that part makes sense, but…. What? I mean, if he’s really found his mate and it’s such a rare thing to find so young, as we’ve previously been told, and his ONLY reason for wanting to break the mate-bond is because she’s a “fragile” human, then are they really mates?
I’m trying to figure out here if “mates” means what it usually means or if it’s a watered-down version for a powerful word in this world. Mates typically is a literal “death if we part” kind of thing. It is always such a rare or incredible honored thing. Yet, here we are, after a week, he’s fled to some unknown entity who we think is a vampire but can transform into something that can fly, to get written instructions on how to break a bond. And then…
THEN… by the time he gets back to the school he’s missed dozens of messages and suddenly decides to just rip up the paper and throw it in the trash at a school for the supernatural?
I’m convinced this is more important than it seems on the surface, but how much more back and forth confusing could we get here? Especially to end with that as our goodbye to the characters until book two.
Push and Pull!
Oh! Don’t get me started on the whole scar thing and pushing Grace away every single moment of every single moment! Talk about back and forth! Goodness… these two are literally fighting to be closer yet refuse to get closer. When one takes a step, the other disappears or takes two steps back. I’m stuck on this mate thing! If they were supposedly mates, I feel like after this much time of Grace practically begging to be with him, he wouldn’t be able to leave so easily. And after he helps save her from the psycho vampire girlfriend of Hudson in the tunnels as she’s prepped to be a sacrifice, he’s accepted her as his mate, yet is acting like a normal guy? I’m sure there’s more to this than meets the eye!
So, all this happened in what felt like a drawn-out book that was trying to target YA readers and still be sexy and alluring, yet not too sexy and alluring so it was an adult version? I’m not sure if that makes sense… I would certainly classify this as YA Fantasy/YA Fiction.
It’s disappointing that there was very little explained about all the species of creatures at the academy. We get a small insight into the politics of the vampires, a small insight into the ability of the dragons and next to nothing about the wolf shifters and nothing about the witches except Macy can do glamour and Grace’s father was a very powerful warlock before he gave it up (mostly maybe?) because he fell in love with her mom. I really wish it had given up more information.
Final Thoughts on Cravy by Tracy Wolff
The vampires that are born are more powerful, yeah, but Jaxon is supposed to be 20 years old (I think??) So why is he in high school at 200? Do they age slower and then freeze at optimum age and THEN go to school? And what exactly are they learning in school? Histories and genetics? Why do the dragons have multiple abilities? Are the wolves forced to form a pack or because they’re shifters and not werewolves are they different? Do the witches have specific sub-categories?
How does it all work for Crave????! I WANT TO KNOW!!!
This kept me absolutely bored out of my mind for the first 460 pages. I am anything if not stubborn though. I am determined to finish this series with the hope that it blossoms and bursts into an insanely creative and fun ride for YA readers!!!
Until next time, Curious One, enjoy each sunrise and every sunset because it’s time for another book!
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