Ich liebe die Verbindung, die sich zwischen Grace und Hudson aufgebaut hat und bin froh, dass sich alles rund um Jaxon entspannt hat. Es ist wirklich faszinierend immer weiter in diese magische Welt einzutauchen und von ihren Regeln zu lernen. Auf de Weg wurden viele Leben verloren und viele Freundschaften geknüpft. Ich bin gespannt, wie sich gewisse Beziehungen weiter entwickeln und wie es im folgenden Band weitergeht, nach der Eröffnung am Ende.

Ich frage mich, was sich zwischen Jaxon und Flint entwickeln wird, wie Mekhi. Gerettet wird, in wiefern Eden und Graces menschliche Freundin zueinander finden, ist Macy komplett raus aus dem Liebesspiel? Wie wird mit Hudsons Fähigkeiten verfahren? Wer ist neuer Vampirregent? Gibt es einen Wechsel der Vertreter der Drachen?

I adore this series. I listened to the audio and could not stop. Pack with action. However, the ending did not make me feel invested as the other. It has been over a month since I finish it and I cannot understand what will be discussed in Cherish. 

you know the saying “look in the mirror before you head out the door and take off 1 accessory”? this book desperately needed that. i feel like about 30%-40% of this could have been cut down or cut out. this book was unnecessarily long, and it felt like a lot of things happened for the sake of shock and to cycle in new characters. 

i wish that there was less of the “this is my mate, how am i sooooo lucky” and “i am so lucky to have such amazing friends, and i need to be courageous for them” type of inner monologues that we saw from grace. it was overkill and unbearably cheesy. 

i think the plot line of the quest type missions they had to go on was kind of cool, but they also seemed meaningless like they had never existed before and only existed to serve the necessity of some sort of adventure mission to find an object of significance that could solve some overarching problem. the pattern is feeling repetitive through each of the books. 

i do really like some of the characters, like flint, remy, calder, and macy. they have grown a lot and contribute so much to the plot and conflicts in this book. i used to love grace but she’s annoying the hell out of me now, even hudson is getting too sappy for me. i miss the days of this series being some petty high school dramatics between paranormals; it has very much lurched into “we’re the underdogs and have to save the world despite all odds against us” which is totally bs when when they also consider themselves some of the most powerful paranormals in existence. 

there are also a lot of points where a solution to a problem is glaringly obvious and yet the “super smart” grace can’t see what’s basically hitting her with a billboard. conversely, there are times where grace encounters a problem and then thinks up a solution that is a complete reach and yet it magically works out. 

TLDR; this is the first book of the series i’ve disliked a majority of. it was way too long and way too cheesy, could have cut down 40% of it probably. i powered through it because i think the next 2 books will be a lot better, and because i did enjoy the books leading up to this book. 

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. 

If this wasn't as long as it was, it would have been a fine/fun read but the length meant it was such a slog to get through. I liked the new info we got on the gargoyle court in this one, and the family connections revealed were fun

Loved the action and additional world building in this book, we learned a lot of new things about these characters and their backstories and it was still interesting and new four books in.

Nine. Hundred. Pages. For what?? Tracy, my girl, this is unnecessary. 
I said in my last review (covet, #3) that the writing was getting marginally better with each book and I’d now like to formally retract that statement. Grace has become insufferable, but it’s not ALL the characters fault, it’s just bad writing. Her internal monologue is so painfully repetitive that it’s near insulting to the reader. If an editor had cut out all the rendundant content you could literally remove hundreds of pages. Having finished this book, I wish there weren’t more. I will read them, of course, but I’m not overly happy about it. I will see this through! 

A few of the most heinously abused and repeated phrases in this book that I hope I never have to read again: 
“My Mate” - we get it. Stop saying it every other sentence 
“You’re ridiculous, you know that right?”
“Force a smile/grin that I’m far from feeling”
“Smile/grin that doesn’t reach his/her/their eyes” 
“Choke back bile in the back of my throat” 
“Laughs without humor”

Side note: for all the novels in this series up until this one I have switched back and forth between reading the ebook and listening to the audiobook to get through them quickly. Don’t listen to this audiobook - the narrator regularly gets the characters accents mixed up mid dialogue and it’s SO confusing. (For example: They’ll say something in Hudson’s voice that Hudson did NOT say, and I’d have to go back to the book to figure out what actually happened in conversation). There’s also continuity issues with pronunciation that is not earth shattering but bothered me to no end (for example, Mehki’s name is suddenly pronounced entirely differently in this book versus the first 3). I had to stop listening and just trudge thru this one the old fashioned way, this perhaps lent to me being more triggered by the writing 🤣