A review by rinku
Court by Tracy Wolff

adventurous emotional hopeful slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

The Crave series honestly gets worse with every book and that is just so unfortunate. Court was by far my least favorite book of the series. It’s mostly boring because many moments are just drawn out, the main relationship made me cringe, and the plot was all over the place with introducing many elements that weren’t present in the previous novels and random plot twists that didn’t make any sense. 

After the events of Covet, Grace and her friends have to find a way to rescue the Katmere students and defeat Cyrus for once and for all. For this, Grace needs an an army and she goes to the gargoyle court for the first time where she learns that she’s not the only gargoyle in existence and that many things aren’t as she thought they would be. 

Like I’ve mentioned above, this sequel just introduces way too many new concepts that weren’t even mentioned in the novels before. Some examples of this are gods and demigods, time travelling, or
Jaxon being randomly a half-dragon
?? Even worse are the random relative revelations that came out of the blue. This is in my opinion always quite the lazy and random plot twist and I just hate it. Here, we learn that
Grace is a relative of Bloodletter and that the Vega brothers have a sister
which was not foreshadowed once and was probably just added to create drama. Everything about this just felt random and not thought through. 

Besides this, there were so many sections that were just so drawn out and didn’t serve any purpose. The Bloodletter reveal section was just so long and boring, it felt to me like they spend like 50 pages in her cave. Another example for this is the training section which also lasts 100 pages and is essentially useless since
they could’ve just talked to the commander of the gargoyle army (I forgot his name lmao)
. This is not the only miscommunication in the course of this novel which annoyed me as well. A problem I furthermore had with the plot is that it takes our character like one third of the book until they take action against Cyrus which was just stupid and added to the slow pace, just like the unnecessary side quests. Again, our characters have to look for some object to further the plot; this time, it’s an antidote and a godly stone(?). 

Sadly, even the action scenes couldn’t interest me, they felt too plain for me. What was also similar to the previous novel is that we had a big fight against Cyrus towards the end but even this couldn’t excite me. Yes, those last chapters were cool, but nothing more. I also found it weird how
he did not say anything anymore when they defeat him? Like, he’s still alive and probably has something to say about Bloodletter, doesn’t he? There was another point in the novel where they rescue this random child, and the child doesn’t say anything to its mother when it’s back
? 

Another problem lies with the characters. Our main squad simply has too many characters and many of them don’t have any or just one characteristic. Because of the high number of characters, I additionally had the feeling that the shares of speech were not well balanced, meaning that some characters say like one sentence every fifty pages just to remind us that they are there as well. I also didn’t care for any of their deaths because the characters dying literally had no character. I was furthermore annoyed by the romance; it was in many moments just too cringe and annoying for my taste. I don’t want to be mean or anything, but Hudson feels to me so much like wish fulfilment that I can’t see him as a real person but more like a cardboard. Other characters were so cliché and one dimensional as well, like Isadora and Cyrus. 

I’m wondering at this point why the Crave series hasn’t ended yet (the answer is money, it’s always money). Court was barely able to add anything significant to the series. The plot is as unfocussed as it was in the last two books, there are too many characters which leads to many of them feeling flat, and the ending felt a bit rushed. 
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