Audiobook Review: Charm (Crave #5)

Audiobook Length: 18 hours 45 minutes

He’s under my skin…

After Katmere, I shouldn’t be surprised by anything. Including the existence of a world beyond my world called the Shadow Realm. Yet here I am, stuck in a strange, dangerous place with the worst of the supernaturals, the monster that other monsters fear: Hudson Vega. He might be Jaxon’s brother and ridiculously hot, but he’s a complete bona fide pain in my ass.

The question is whether we’ll find a way out before I kill him…or run out of time.

She’s stealing my heart…

It’s a truth universally known—at least according to Grace—that everything is my fault. But I have a nasty suspicion that Grace isn’t as human as she thinks, and she’s the one keeping us trapped. Now we’ll have to work together not only to survive, but to save all those we’ve come to call family who live here.

Because there’s something connecting us. Something stronger than fear…and way more bloody dangerous.

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Charm is the fifth novel in the Crave series, which fills in the gaps when Grace is stone between the first and second novels. It was interesting to be transported back to the time before Hudson and Grace were together. The story alternates between the POVs of Hudson and Grace, so I liked that readers got to see both sides of the story. The first part of the story follows Hudson and Grace getting to know each other. Like the other novels, it is very repetitive in many parts from the inner monologues to the amount of times pop tarts and Dr. Pepper were mentioned. It was nice to get to see how Grace and Hudson went first from enemies to friends, but I feel this portion did not need to be so long.

Grace is trying to figure out Hudson and, of course, figures out that he is not the bad guy his reputation says he is. This is something already known to the reader as it’s told repeatedly in the previous stories and this novel just shows how Grace first discovers it. As the two spend a long time together, Hudson slowly opens up and it was nice to finally get to know the different sides of him. The two of them go through a lot of seemingly random adventures in this story including dealing with a dragon and going to the Shadow Realm. While some pieces of it did make sense, I expected more answers to the questions. I do not know still reasons about Grace losing her memories or why certain events occurred, so I am hoping there may be something in the final novel.

I enjoyed the concept of this story as I feel filling in this missing timeline was necessary for the reader to understand things more, but I feel this book was drawn out too much. It seemed to have no clear direction and the time jumps do not help as it seemed unnecessary. I understand the time portion was perhaps to give Hudson and Grace more time to bond and for their relationship to see more natural, but I think the novel still could have cut a lot from this novel and have it still have the same effect. The inner monologue repetition has been present in all five novels, so far, but I still hold out hope that it will get better by the end. As I have made it this far in Grace’s story, I am still going to continue, but this, so far, is not a re-readable series for me.