Right off the bat, I have to say that my thoughts on the second book in Tracy Wolff’s Crave series, Crush, are rather complicated, because in some ways I liked it more than I liked Crave, but at the same time, I also thought that at times this book somehow managed to lack even more originality than the first book did. Crush also has a variety of other aspects to it that I definitely think could have been better. However, despite its flaws, Crush is definitely a really fun guilty pleasure book, much like the first book in the series was. That being said, here are my thoughts on Crush.
I thought that it was pretty interesting that a major plot point in Crush was Grace finding out that she’s a gargoyle and learning how to use the abilities that come along with being a gargoyle; because I honestly can’t think of any other YA books where the premise involves gargoyles. Grace discovering in this book that she’s a gargoyle is definitely something that I think helps set Tracy Wolff’s Crave series apart from other YA fantasy series. Grace finding out in this book that she’s a gargoyle definitely came as quite a surprise to me, because in Crave (The book) I really thought that Wolff was setting things up for Grace to become a vampire later on in the series.
However, I definitely think that there are a lot of missed opportunities on Wolff’s part when it comes to how she handled the reveal that Grace is a gargoyle. It seemed really weird to me that Grace pretty much didn’t seem upset or say anything at all about the fact that her parents had never told her that she was a gargoyle while they were still alive. She was simply initially in shock when everybody told her that she was a gargoyle, which is something I can completely understand. The other thing that frustrated me about Wolff’s execution of Grace discovering that she’s a gargoyle and how to use the magical abilities that she has as a gargoyle is how quickly she always learned how to do something. Instead of struggling to get the hang of her abilities for at least a couple of chapters and experiencing some genuine frustration, which could have led to some potentially compelling storytelling, Grace basically always figured out how to successfully use her abilities within a matter of a few pages; which typically led to lovey dovey moments between Jaxon and Grace that ultimately proved to be incredibly repetitive almost immediately.
