Rating: ★★★★★
Genre: Sci Fi & Fantasy, Teens & YA
Publisher: Ink Smith Publishing
Publication Date: January 8, 2018
“It seems to me that great sacrifices bring about great gifts. Unusual gifts. Miraculous gifts.” ~ Grey Lore
Pace and Kennedy deliver a fast-paced, gripping story in Grey Lore that blends reality and folklore so masterfully that the two seem inseparable.
Summary:
When Ella’s mother dies in a tragic accident, she’s sent off to Napper, Indiana, to live with her aunt. The town is small, with seemingly nothing much going for it. Ella doesn’t exactly fit in, but then again, neither do the two friends she makes. Sam lives in a trailer, the son of a traveling vacuum salesman with hardly a dollar to his name, hoping to make enough sales in Napper to keep food on their table. Sarah is the daughter of fairly well-off parents, but is bored with her lifestyle and looking for something exciting or, at the very least, something more to life than her current humdrum existence.
Things don’t stay dull for very long. Ella is sure she’s hearing dogs talk during the full moon, and afraid of being thrown in the local asylum, she tells no one. Instead, she seeks solace in the few things she has left that were her mother’s. Namely, the stories her mother had written down and hidden, the ones she used to tell Ella at bedtime. Lore about werewolves and metals and darker times. She’s comforted to have pages her mother wrote in her own hand, stories that had been told from her own lips, but things like that don’t happen in reality, right?
Still, there are wolves roaming the woods in and around the town, not to mention a serial killer whose MO includes a silver bullet and the removal of the victim’s teeth. One thing’s for sure: Napper isn’t nearly as boring as the three kids had first believed.
The Good:
- The character voices were great. They were easy to read, engaging, and sounded very much like teenagers, which made me laugh sometimes at their teen brain (in a good way) and their sarcasm. They were all very relatable, and I found myself rooting for them.
- The mystery! My goodness, the mystery. Or mysteries, since there were a lot of them. The story was masterfully written so that it unfolds, little by little, while still keeping its secrets. Try as I may, I didn’t quite piece it all together until I was obviously meant to, even though I’m usually really good at guessing endings. I find the unpredictability refreshing, and I just had to keep reading so I could solve everything.
- The folklore and themes that are woven through the story are fantastic. They’re meaningful and give a lot of depth to the story. Some of them are retellings of stories that we know and love, like Little Red Riding Hood, but sometimes retellings don’t have happy endings, right? The folklore motif played a big part, and I really enjoyed not only the depth it added to the story, but the questions it surfaced and the way it made me, as a reader, really think about both the lore and the overall book.
- The world-building is wonderful. It’s actually quite in depth, and I loved learning how rich this alternate world is, but it wasn’t cumbersome. There were no giant info dumps that had my eyes glazing over. The tidbits were slipped naturally into the story, and I found that I was eager to learn more every time they came up.
- I don’t know, everything? As far as books go, this had it all. Mystery, puzzles, action, romance, lore, and wolves. I happen to be a big fan of wolves. If you’re more of a cat person, there’s also a cat, and he’s snarky and fantastic.
The Bad:
- There were still some loose threads. One of the villain’s motives didn’t make sense to me. I wasn’t sure what their endgame was or what they were hoping to gain from their actions, because it actually seemed to be contrary to what they said motivated them to do the things they did. (I’m being intentionally vague. Is it working?) There was also one character in particular that stood out as having been alluded to serving a very important purpose, and it seemed like they had the potential to be a vital fulcrum, if you will, someone to turn the tide of the story. All that setup, however, seemed to sort of just fall by the wayside, and he never appears again in the ending, and there’s no real conclusion to his arc.
- The ending. I mean, it wasn’t bad, I suppose. It was happy, which is more or less what I might expect for a YA novel. But it was too neat and clean. With how high the stakes were and how dramatic the climax was, there was no real denouement, just an epilogue that feels a little too “happily ever after,” but not in the neat sort that would tie into the folklore feel. It just felt too unrealistic, too rainbows and sunshine for me after everything.
- This wasn’t really a negative for me (but it wasn’t necessarily a positive, either), and I know that some people likely will find it annoying, so I’ll mention it. The point of view in this book is all over the place. There are no markers for what point of view it’s in until a name is used, and in some instances, to up the suspense factor, no names are used (like in the antagonist point of views). Because there’s no steady rhyme or reason to the switching of the point of views, it was sometimes hard to know whose point of view I was in or where/when things were happening, so I was occasionally confused. That being said, the changing point of views were highly effective in building the suspense and unfolding the mystery little by little, so I think the book would have lost a lot of the power it had were it written any other way. So this isn’t so much a bad as a heads up. If you can’t stand the constantly switching point of views, then this maybe isn’t for you.
Overall:
I simply could not put this book down. To the point where my husband threatened to divorce me if I didn’t turn the light off so he could get some sleep. I considered it, I really did, just to find out what happens. But, you know, he’s kind of handy to have around, and I’ve put all this time into training him.
From the very start of the book, I was hooked, and I remained hooked through the whole thing. There were very few, if any, slow sections, and no parts that jumped out where I thought, Well, I could probably put it down here and take a break. Very rarely does that ever happen.
Grey Lore definitely earned its five-star rating, and I can’t recommend it enough. I enjoyed it so much, in fact, that I will be checking out Grey Stone, the other book Jean Knight Pace and Jacob Kennedy wrote together. I just hope there will be more books in the future, as this is a world I would love to revisit.
Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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