Thank you to Entangled Teen and Tracy Wolff for the ARC of this book and opportunity to read it early. All opinions in this review are my own.
The absolute chokehold this book had on me for the 4 days I was reading it was unbelievable. I do not know if there are words to adequately express how much space this book has taken up in my brain for the past week, and will continue to take up for the foreseeable future. If this book series does the same thing Crave did, where each book subsequently gets better than the last, I am going to have to come up with a new star rating system since I can’t mark higher than 5 stars.
This book is book one in the spin-off series to Tracy’s NYT Bestselling Crave series, and from the gate this book is absolutely phenomenal. It follows Clementine Calder and Jude Abernathy-Lee over the course of a few days when a freak storm hits the Calder Academy campus causing absolute chaos. Clementine is a traditional Tracy heroine – she is feisty, she stands up for what she wants, she makes sure that people aren’t getting hurt to the best of her ability, and sometimes to her detriment. Jude is dark and broody, handsome and aloof, and all Clementine wants is to regain the friendship (and maybe more…) she had with him before her world got turned upside-down three years before. There is a ragtag group of friends that all very clearly have their own personalities and are super fun characters in their own right – I would gladly read a book about any of the side characters in Tracy’s books because they are so dynamic. This book will keep you on your toes as you try to figure out what the “big bad” is of this book – is it the storm? is it the adults? is it the other students? Who’s to say.. – and the nods to the Crave series is a wonderful connection for those of us who are trying to stay connected to that world.
Is this book the same as the Crave series/is it book 7 in the Crave series? Absolutely not. Tracy has successfully managed to create a spinoff that can be read on its own without reading or spoiling anything from the original series. Obviously it spoils a few aspects of that series, since it takes place after book 6 ends, but nothing that would cause you to not enjoy the Crave series if you read it second. These books do a beautiful job touching on mental health concerns, and if panic/anxiety disorders & identity development are the themes of the Crave series, then this series is PTSD and learning what it means to trust after significant trauma. This book is beautiful, and it resonated so deeply with me, and I cannot wait for the world to get to read it.