Crave by Tracy Wolff Review

Crave

By Tracy Wolff

My Rating: ★★★★☆

Genres: Paranormal/Supernatural, Romance, Contemporary, YA

Book 1 of the Crave series

*I received this book in exchange for a review from Netgalley and the publisher*

I wish I could just wave a wand and put everything back the way it used to be.

After her parents die in a car crash, Grace's perfect world is stolen from her. Moving from sunny San Diego, California, to the elite private school in Alaska where her uncle is headmaster turns her life upside down, she leaves behind her friends and home for a freezing castle in the middle of nowhere and a dorm room shared with her cousin who she hasn't seen for years. After a long flight followed by an hour and a half long snowmobile ride to the school, all she wants to do is fall into bed and sleep, but when she arrives she meets the mysterious Jaxon. Instead of the warm welcome she was hoping for, Jason first cautions her that a chess piece shaped like a vampire queen might bite her, then misquotes Hamlet, before finishing off with a threat and warning to leave the school as soon as possible. Distracted, Grace turns away for a few seconds, and when she turns back he has disappeared without a trace. Determined to adapt to her new home, she ignores this and heads up to the dorm room she is now sharing with her cousin, Macy, to get some much needed sleep. 

Grace's plans, however, are foiled by her altitude sickness from travelling from San Diego at sea level, to Katmere Academy in the heights of Alaska. Since she can't sleep and doesn't want to wake Macy up, who has been nothing but kind to her from the moment she arrived, Grace decides to go and explore the castle for a while. And this is when things start to get really weird. During her midnight wanderings, Grace meets two of her fellow students who, instead of being polite to her or simply ignoring her, try their best to persuade her to go outside of the castle and into the snow outside, where the temperature would be enough to kill her if she was left alone out there for long in just her pyjamas.  Luckily, the strange boy from earlier Jaxon, comes to her rescue. Whereas last time he was cold and threatening, this time he quickly gets rid of the two boys and comforts Grace. There's an undeniable chemistry between the two of them, the boy that she met earlier seems to have disappeared. But before long, he makes his excuses and leaves Grace again. 

Throughout that week, things just get weirder and weirder. There's the stark difference between the students at the school, who are entirely divided into cliques; Flint, another student she meets who hates Jaxon with a burning passion; the way Macy keeps starting to describe people, before breaking off mid-sentence as if she is trying to hide something; and all the near-death accidents she keeps having. Grace knows that something is being hidden from her, and she has to find out what's going on at Katmere Academy. She's desperate to get answers to all her questions, but will they be the answers that comfort her, or keep her awake after bedtime, afraid of all the things that go bump in the night?

"You wear indifference like a mask; you wield coldness like a weapon - not because you feel nothing but because you feel too much."

When I first saw the book, I wasn't so sure that I would like it. The cover makes it seem like a bit of a Twilight rip-off, which isn't the best first impression, but I'm so glad that I did carry on with it because I ended up enjoying it a lot more than I expected to. The first thing that I like about the book was the character Macy. She was just so sweet and adorable, and written in a way that didn't make her seem cheesy or naive, but rather that she was just a good person. She was the perfect soon to be best friend of Grace from the beginning, which provided a good contrast to the way all the other students were treating her. 

Along with the characters, the way high school life was written and described was fairly realistic, which made it a lot more relatable for me. It wasn't so over-exaggerated that it just seemed silly, but it wasn't so different to a real-life high school either. I think that the author found a great balance between the fact that Katmere Academy would obviously be quite different from the average reader's school, but at the same time not going so over the top with the description that it would be impossible to believe in the storyline. When reading a book about paranormal teenage characters, I feel like the writer has to be careful to not make it too much of either of these things, in this case Wolff did a good job. 

The last thing that made the book stick out for me were all the chapter titles. Most books at the moment just use numbered chapters, but it was much more enjoyable for me to have all the quirky titles at the start of the chapters in this book, it added a bit of fun to the books, especially in some of the more tense moments. 

There weren't many things I disliked about the book, but the main thing for me was how obviously clichéd it was. It would have been alright if there were only a few, or they were less noticeable, but there were just a few too many, and they were a bit too obvious. However, Grace did seem pretty aware of how clichéd her life was becoming, at a couple of points she even compares it to Twilight! This did help out the problem, as I found it made her situation a little funnier and less predictable. The one other thing that slightly got on my nerves were the pop culture references that seemed to be randomly just thrown into the book. A couple would be alright for me, but sometimes it felt like they'd just been put into the book to try to make it really relatable to teenage readers, only it didn't quite work properly.

All in all, Crave was much better than I was expecting, but it isn't one of those books that really stands out to me. I did get hooked in by it come the end of the book, so I will be reading the next book in the series, Crush, when it comes out, but I'm not absolutely desperate to read it right away.