Crave

Crave is the first novel of Tracy Wolff's Crave series, published in 2020. It is a young adult paranormal romance set at an isolated academy in Alaska, where the students belong to factions that are not human and the school is not the one it advertises to the outside world.

Grace comes to the academy after losing both parents, which makes her the newest arrival in a place where everyone already knows each other. The students dislike her on principle, and she cannot work out which of the warring factions she might belong to, if she belongs at all. Then there is Jaxon Vega, a vampire who has kept himself sealed off for a century, has a reason for it, and whose reason is the same kind of thing she has been trying to hide.

Grace recognises it, which is what separates the two of them from the rest of the school. The book is a gothic boarding-school story in which the students are monsters, nobody has written the rules down, and being noticed is the dangerous part. The romance runs alongside the question of what the academy is actually for and what the families who send their children to it expect in return.

The series continues in Crush, Covet, Court and Charm, and the first novel establishes Grace, Jaxon, the academy and the factions inside it. It is the opening volume of a five-book series rather than a standalone story, and it is told from Grace's point of view as she works out what the school is protecting.