Score: 4/5 Bookmarks

Steam Rating: 🍆 /5

Take Twilight, move it to an Alaskan boarding school, throw in a dash of True Blood (but without all the sex — this is a YA novel after all), add a pinch of Vampire Diaries, and you've got Crave by Tracy Wolff. Is it original? Nope. Is it completely bingeable though? Absolutely.

Grace moves to Alaska, when both of her parents die, to live with her uncle and cousin. Her uncle runs a posh boarding school and her cousin is a student there. From day one things seem a bit off to Grace, but she’s determined to move on and start her new life in the north. Enter tall, brooding, dangerous boy. Boy falls instantly in love with Grace, for reasons that aren’t obvious to the reader, and then spends the rest of the book trying to defend and protect her. But in the end, isn’t it the heroine’s job to save the troubled boy?

There were a lot of weird little details that I kept getting snagged on, distracting me from the story. For example, the characters were able to run down a corridor during a magnitude 7 earthquake (we recently had a 4.6 here in Seattle and our house shook so much I couldn't have crawled across the room). And in a separate scene, the main character suddenly refers to a measurement in centimeters. I'm ALL for the metric system (it is infinitely superior, just FYI), but the character is from San Diego, living in Alaska, and the Author is from Texas, so what gives? I know, I know, I’m nitpicking. But little things like that pull me right out of a story and then I spend time thinking about them instead of just enjoying the ride.

But whatever magic that is created by that angsty, forbidden teenage love, I am here for it. I basically listened to the entire 14 hour and 56-minute audiobook in one hit. The audiobook narration is excellent by the way—performed by Heather Costa and Tim Paige. You can grab your own copy of it here. Otherwise click the button below for a physical copy.

And if a new Twilight book coming out isn't enough to satiate your vampiric thirst for forbidden, supernatural love then you're in luck — Crave is part of a trilogy and the second book 'Crush' comes out in September, 2020.

Synopsis:

My whole world changed when I stepped inside the academy. Nothing is right about this place or the other students in it. Here I am, a mere mortal among gods…or monsters. I still can’t decide which of these warring factions I belong to, if I belong at all. I only know the one thing that unites them is their hatred of me.

Then there’s Jaxon Vega. A vampire with deadly secrets who hasn’t felt anything for a hundred years. But there’s something about him that calls to me, something broken in him that somehow fits with what’s broken in me.

Which could spell death for us all.

Because Jaxon walled himself off for a reason. And now someone wants to wake a sleeping monster, and I’m wondering if I was brought here intentionally—as the bait.