First of all, the title of this chapter makes no sense. If I asked you one adjective to describe libraries, I think “quiet” would be one of the first that came to your mind. Quiet places aren’t exactly known for their ability to muffle sounds. Wear really, really squeaky boots to an uncarpeted courtroom and see.
It’s more like… at hockey games, no one can hear you scream.
But that’s not the only “Have you ever been in a library?” moment I had during this chapter.
Anyway, Grace is running away from the party, and she doesn’t care where she’s going.
I have no idea what I did to make Jaxon so mad, have no idea why he blows so hot and cold with me. I’ve run into him four times since I got to this frozen hellhole, and each time has been a different experience.
And only two of them weren’t terrible, going by Grace’s description:
Douchey the first time, blank the second, intense the third, and furious the fourth.
“Blank” and “intense” are neutral words, but “douchey” and “furious” are definitely negatives.
Hey, teens! Would you like to talk with some of the latest slang?
His moods change more quickly than my bestie’s Insta feed.
This book came out in 2020. That sentence was dated when the book came out. I understand the challenges of writing contemporary stories, because using contemporary words is inevitable. And I get how hard it is to write about teenagers when one is two decades past that time in their lives. But this line just screams, “How do you do, fellow kids?” Here’s a Writing Tip from a mom with two teenagers of her own: they talk exactly the way adults do, and don’t intentionally seek out words that are “on-trend.”
Unless they’re trying to mock me.
Not to mention that people’s Instagrams don’t “change,” they update. Also, not loving “more quickly” when “faster” exists.
Sorry to seem so picky when thus far I haven’t really found much I don’t like about this book. I just happened to read this chapter and it feels like it’s taking a turn and I’m disappointed and cranky. But I’m not giving up hope.
Grace is wondering why she ran off the way she did, just because Jaxon ate a strawberry.
Deep inside, I know it’s more than that. It’s the look on his face, the indolence of his body language, the very obvious fuck you in his eyes as he stared directly at me. But still, fleeing the way I did seems absurd now.
I guess I don’t have to worry about anybody gaslighting Grace in this book. She’ll just do it herself. She’s describing this guy as having hostile body language and giving her “fuck you” vibes, but she’s going, no, I am the one who is absurd. No! Absurd is having your own like, velvet throne in the middle of a party and biting a strawberry as a threat! That is absurd behavior, even in a vampire novel! That is some True Blood level absurdity!
While she’s wandering and mentally abusing herself, she finds herself standing outside of the school library. She’s another bookish YA heroine, so she goes inside.
Look, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with bookish people, or bookish heroines, or bookish YA heroines in particular. They’re just not that fresh or unusual and this is the least interesting thing we’ve learned about Grace, so far. Also, we’ve had zero indication that Grace is particularly bookish, at all. When she’s arriving in chapter one, she doesn’t think about all the books she left behind. She thinks about her art supplies and her drum kit. The only other times books have been mentioned at all have been as part of descriptions of a room or what people are doing. Grace has never been like, I wish they would leave me alone so I could just read, or anything like that. Book lovers would have those thoughts.
But let’s get back to it. Grace goes into the library and it’s not a friendly-feeling place.
The moment I do, I get hit with the oddest feeling. Dread pools in my stomach, and everything inside tells me to turn around, to go back the way I came.
She ignores it and stays in the library long enough that the feeling goes away.
It only takes a second for the feeling of dread to dissipate and for absolute wonder to take its place. Because whoever runs this library is my kind of people. Part of it is the sheer number of books—tens of thousands of them at least, lined up in bookcase after bookcase. But there are other things, too.
Gargoyles perched on random bookshelves, looking down as if guarding the books.
A few dozen shimmering crystals, interspersed with sparkling ribbons, hanging from the ceiling in what appears to be randomly spaced intervals.
There are tons of spots to sit and read, too.
But the pièce de résistance, the thing that has me dying to meet the librarian, is the stickers plastered everywhere. On the walls, on the bookshelves, on the desks and chairs and computers. Everywhere. Big stickers, little stickers, funny stickers, encouraging stickers, brand-name stickers, emoji stickers, sarcastic stickers… The list goes on and on, and there’s a part of me that wants to wander the library until I read or look at every single one.
But there are too many for one tour—too many for a dozen tours, if I’m honest—so I decide to start this one by checking out the stickers I run across when following the gargoyles.
I have read enough urban fantasy to know that these gargoyles will prove to be sentient and sticker-obsessed and pretty much every line out of their mouths will be easily imagined as an ’00s Hot Topic t-shirt slogan.
Grace realizes that the gargoyles aren’t placed randomly, and she wonders if the librarian is trying to direct people to something specific.
Once again, I’m gonna point out that, upon reaching the vast, eccentrically decorated, gargoyle-filled library with crystals hanging all over the place in a boarding school full of mysterious and intense students, this fan of Legacies, a show about a boarding school full of mysterious, intense students, has not figured out that she’s in a magical school yet.
But let’s meet the gargoyles that I guarantee will end up being sentient and/or the librarians.
The first gargoyle—a fierce-looking thing with bat wings and a furious snarl—stands guard over a shelf of horror novels. The bookshelf itself is decorated with Ghostbusters stickers, and I can’t help but laugh as I trace the spines of everyone from John Webster to Mary Shelley, from Edgar Allan Poe to Joe Hill. The fact that there’s a special homage to Victor Hugo only makes it better, especially the tongue-in-cheek placement of three copies of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame right in the gargoyle’s line of sight.
Wait. From John Webster (W) to Marry Shelley (S)? From Edgar Allen Poe (P) to Joe Hill (H)? And The Hunchback of Notre-Dame is in the horror section and not just general fiction like other classic gothic novels generally are? I appreciate that this is telegraphing the fact that these gargoyles are almost certainly going to be sentient comic relief exactly like the Disney version but the joke is not funny enough for all the problems it creates. We’ve just been told that Grace loves libraries and she just can’t resist them… so why didn’t she immediately notice that the alphabet is out of order? That books are in sections they usually aren’t?
Anyway, back to the gargoyles. There’s the fierce one, then a fat one sitting on a pile of skulls on top of a bookshelf with human anatomy books––wait. Wait a second. Why is human anatomy mixed in with fiction? This place is a mess. Then there’s a girl gargoyle reading on top of a shelf of fantasy books.
I decide instantly that she’s my favorite and pick out a book from her shelf to read tonight in case I can’t sleep. Then nearly laugh out loud as I trace my finger around the edges of a sticker that reads, “I’m not a damsel in distress; I’m a dragon in a dress.”
The groan I just let out, yous all. Brace yourself for “normal is just a setting on a dryer,” or “reality is nice to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there.”
I swear, I’m not hating this book. It is still the least bad book we’ve read here. To the point that I’m like, does this even belong here (especially since the hype plummeted shortly after these recaps started)? But this chapter is just so much cringe. It’s another example of that uneven writing I’ve mentioned before.
On and on it goes, and the longer I’m here, the more convinced I am that the head librarian here is the coolest person ever––and has fantastic taste in books.
*extreme Morbo voice* LIBRARIANS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY.
No, but seriously, they don’t. Librarians aren’t tasked with amassing a collection of books they enjoy. They’re supposed to fill the library with materials their patrons enjoy. This being a school library, there are also going to have to be books that are used to teach the curriculum, right? And one assumes that the librarian isn’t focusing on being “cool” but enriching the students’ lives with crucial literature for their development. I’m not disputing that librarians are cool, I just don’t think Grace (who is an avid library fan?) knows how libraries work or like, kind of what they even are?
Grace is still following the shelves with the gargoyles on them (apparently, there are more than three? I had to reread this library scene several times to understand that the “final gargoyle” mentioned at one point is not the third gargoyle grace described, but another gargoyle entirely and there are several more. At least, I think that’s what’s happening? Like I said, this is one of those chapters where the writing is just so completely uneven that it’s impossible to believe it was written by the same person who wrote the rest of the book. But anyway, she ends up at a sign restricting access to a room that’s clearly in use, but the sign makes Grace want to check it out even more.
Especially since the light is on and there’s some weird kind of music playing.
I’m noting the “weird” part because we’re gonna discuss it.
Just like we’re gonna discuss this:
I try to place it, but as I get closer, I realize it’s not so much music as it is chanting in a language I don’t recognize and certainly can’t understand.
Like, am I drunk? Is chanting not music? I thought we settled that pretty definitively back when everyone was losing their virginities to CDs of Latin masses back in the early 1990’s.
The fact that it’s not a language she knows makes Grace super hype because:
When I was researching Alaska, I learned that there are twenty different languages spoken here by the state’s native peoples, and I can’t help but wonder if that’s what I’m hearing. I hope so—I’ve totally been wanting a chance to listen to one of the native languages spoken. Especially since so many of them are threatened, including a couple that have less than four thousand speakers in the entire world. That these native languages are dying out is one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard.
Grace came to Alaska without appropriate winter gear, but she researched the local tribes?
There’s so much about that paragraph that makes the left corner of my mouth pull sharply down and my eyebrows wince together as I slowly back from the proverbial room. Grace hears “weird” music that isn’t “music” because it’s in a native language and…like, idk how to break this to you, Ms. Wolff, but natives have music. And while this is preferable to the “natives are werewolves” angle Twilight took, this is getting a big yikes from me because there haven’t been any native characters introduced at all.
Maybe if I’m lucky, I can kill two birds with one stone here. I can meet the very cool librarian responsible for this library and get a lesson from her (because the voice is definitely female) on one of those native languages.
Soooooo much happening here. I need to go to bullet points.
- the door has a sign saying students aren’t allowed in the room
- you cannot tell someone is “definitely” a certain gender based on voice
- especially if you’re listening to singing in a musical style and language you’ve never heard
- access to the room might be restricted for reasons related to that singing, i.e., this could be someone praying or something
- access to the language might restricted from Grace owing to not being a part of the culture
Grace plans to interrupt this person, whom she assumes is native, to barge into what they’re doing in private so they can teach her about their culture.
But when I step up to the door, ready to introduce myself, I find that the person doing the chanting isn’t the librarian at all. She’s a girl about my age, with long, silky dark hair and one of the most beautiful faces I’ve ever seen. Maybe the most beautiful.
- you cannot always reliably tell a person’s age from their appearance
- librarians can be beautiful
Here’s an assumption I’m going to make. “long, silky dark hair” is going to either mean that she is, in fact, Native, or she’s going to end up being descended from an East Asian ethnic group.
Which makes the rest of her description real, real uncomfy:
Whoever she is, she looks fierce, cheeks flushed, mouth open wide to let out the unique sounds of whatever language she is speaking. She stops mid-word, with what looks an awful lot like fury burning in her swirling black eyes.
Whether this character turns out to be Asian or Native, that description is not gonna look great in hindsight. Major Apolonia “beautiful savage” vibes going on there that I’m not a fan of.
So, again, I have to wonder: how was this written by one author? Because this chapter is so full of groan-worthy crap, from the Hot Topic t-shirt slogan-style joke to the “teen” slang and Grace suddenly being passionate about researching Native languages. In fact, this chapter doesn’t even feel like it belongs in the same book at all. We’re told early on that Grace has lost interest in things because her parents died and her whole life has been this numb whirlwind of change, but suddenly she was like, hang on, lemme take a second out of my grief coma to research not “will I need a wooly hat in Alaska’s famously frigid climate” but the languages of the local Native tribes. And the thing about suddenly being so into libraries and books just randomly popping up in chapter eleven with no previous mention of the possibility at all just floors me.
I don’t know, I’m just reeling at the sudden change between the book we were reading and the book we’re now reading. The writing is uneven, the characterization is uneven, the 2013-level white savior moment is bizarre… I don’t know what’s happening here and at this point, the failed hype is transparently the work of a publisher desperate to have the “next” Twilight and not concerned with the actual content of the book they were doling out cash to publicize.
That is such a 180 on Grace’s character that I can’t help but wonder if she was somehow transformed by that intense strawberry eating, like maybe when Pretentious Vampire Loser bit into it he was really casting some kind of spell to make Grace into…a “not like other girls” who is exactly like all the other “not like other girls”. She was avoiding that pretty well up till now.
Also, before even reading your comments about the list of authors I was all “but, that’s not how books are sorted in libraries. Did she walk in backwards? because Shelley doesn’t come after Webster nor Poe before Hill. WTF?
I realize I’m not the target audience for this book, and maybe that audience feels differently, but: to me, “nothing happens nothing happens nothing happens, something happens that’s only a cliffhanger because there’s a page break instead of a line break before we find out why it happened” is not a unit of storytelling. It does not make me feel like I have experienced story. What it feels like is someone using formatting to try and trick me into thinking I have, the same way a comedy movie trailer will throw in a record-scratch to make you think what you just saw was funny.
I’ve considered the point of view that chapters serve no purpose in books for adults (cf Terry Pratchett), and I *do* think they’re useful, mainly as formatting (it’s a heavier pause than a paragraph break)… HOWMEVER, this is not what chapters are for. You can’t use chapters to make it seem like the story has reached some exciting new stage when it hasn’t. And I feel like that’s something a lot of the Jealous Hater Book Club selections have done (HFM, I think, was a repeat offender) and it is slowly radicalizing me against chapters.
From what I read in this recap, I get the impression that the chanting isn’t meant to be chanting as in “Gregorian Chants CD” but rather chanting as in “chanting slogans.” English isn’t my native language, so correct me if I’m mistaken about that being one meaning of the phrase “chanting”, but maybe that’s what Grace means–talking sort of rhythmically but not featuring an actual melody. (I mean, to be fair, rap music is talking rhythmically and it still counts as music, but that’s different because it’s meant to be a musical performance.)
Also, concerning the book’s hype, I was seriously surprised the other day. The Crave series has become a HUGE hit recently. It’s number 3 at the NY Times YA bestseller list as I write this, and last week it was number 1.
Ugh, I did NOT mean this to be a reply to your comment, madseance. I apologize for my mistake.
Now I’m feeling curious about Tracy Wolff. She seems to be quite the book factory — over 60 books published starting in 2008, or about 4-5 a year. Granted that a good number of them appear to be self-pubbed novellas rather than anything too long and complicated. But wow, super prolific.
Goodreads says the Crave series is going to be 7 books, all published between April 2020 and May 2023, so there’s not much waiting between installments. Number 4 came out this month, which might explain the series’ appearance on the NYT bestseller list. And these books are all 600-700+ pages long — a massive endeavor. Maybe she is having to farm out some of the writing.
Not disputing the general weirdness of this chapter, but I think that perhaps the “Webster to Shelley, Poe to Hill” sorting is not the actual order on the shelf but Grace sorting them by age/era from earliest to latest in her head. I would probably do the same and say something like “from Bram Stoker to Stephen King” even though K comes before S.
That actually does make sense. It also adds some credence to the “she likes books” narrative by having her think of authors chronologically instead of alphabetically.
I haven’t read the book, so I can’t REALLY say anything, but from what you’ve said I can’t help but wonder if Crave was actually written by multiple people. The author set out to write a cheesy-but-well-written urban fantasy, then the publisher either added or made her add more and more weird/bad writing and characterization and Relatable Teenness because it was supposed to be the Next Twilight and teens LOVE that kind of stuff, right? Or the publisher/editor kept sending back drafts and asking for more typical elements and the author ran out of energy to make them good while they were so different from what she sent out to write. It does really feel like… there’s a difference between cheesy/tropey books that are good and books that have nothing to support themselves besides trends and tropes, and I’d thought this book was the former. And I believe you said the author’s other books were good?
I was thinking the same thing!
I actually thought this chapter provided a good explanation for why the “teen slang” was so dated Grace is a recluse who spends all her time in libraries — that’s why she talks funny. I haven’t seen anyone say “FML” in a long time, and it was charmingly nostalgic.
I’m with Grace on the strawberry thing — if you ran out of the room every time a popular boy looked at you with a mean expression in high school, you’d probably feel silly afterwards and want to not do that, since it’s not the smartest thing to do in that kind of environment. I definitely get that there’s some weird vampire magic going on that triggered her flight instinct, but it makes sense that she’d feel like she overreacted. Popular people glaring at you is just part of the high school experience sometimes. Doesn’t make it okay, but it happens.
Okay now that I’ve actually read the previous 10 chapters of Crave, I take back the earlier part of this comment. This came out of nowhere and made no sense with Grace’s previous characterization. Also, she really doesn’t know how libraries work.
“Grace hears “weird” music that isn’t “music” because it’s in a native language and…like, idk how to break this to you, Ms. Wolff, but natives have music.”
Nah, I think she doesn’t think it’s music because she doesn’t count chanting as music. But then, the assumption that surely the native person will be delighted to have some rando barge in on their private occasion, expecting to get free lessons… eehhhhhh.
It could be turned on its head nicely if Grace was chewed out for these kinds of assumptions and behaviour. Then including this in here would be more justified – that way of approaching the world is just the whitest thing, and I’m not sure if teenage me would have done much better (well, except for the barging in part). But I don’t expect this to be that kind of book. Rather, I’m afraid the random inclusion of the plight of the native languages was an attempt to be woke.
So, uh… how could she tell that one of the gargoyles was female? What kind of sexual dimorphism do gargoyles have? Is one of them wearing a dress and/or hair ribbon, “Ms. Male Character”-style?
The way I’d write it, if indeed these are going to be talking creatures, is to have their gender only be indicated when they introduce themselves.