The Gravewood

by Kelly Andrew

🐣🐣🐣🐣

4/5 ducklings

tl;dr what happens when your boyfriend’s boyfriend’s sister goes missing in a forest that may or may not literally eat people?

Um. What the hell did I just read? I haven’t yelled at a book this much in very long time. I went on a picnic and decided it was time to leave the third time I yelled “Oh, shit!” and got some concerned looks from two lovely people playing with their dogs.

I had so much fun reading The Gravewood! It’s the kind of tragedy I absolutely love, the kind where no one dies but everyone has made terrible choices and has to live with the consequences. And, oh boy, are there consequences.

Shae is hard of hearing and uses hearing aids, which is a problem at the end of the world because she’s run out of batteries. Which makes her the perfect person to venture into the Gravewood, the carnivorous forest that whispers sinister promises to anyone who can hear, to make a deal with the Devil.

The Devil, it turns out, is an eighteen year old vampire. A very cute eighteen year old vampire, if Shae doesn’t say so herself. An eighteen year old vampire who is immediately smitten with the girl who braved the Gravewood to offer him her blood in exchange for batteries for her hearing aids.

Oliver Lysander, (you can tell he’s eighteen because his name is just so dramatic) is the Devil of the Gravewood, the mysterious leader of a little vampire kingdom that he carved out in the snowy northern forest, beyond the reach of the ruler of the rest of the vampires, Paris Keeling.

Six months later, six months of Lys and Shae’s “business transactions”, six months of Shae hiding yet another secret in the basement of her house, Shae’s best friend’s brother and childhood crush suddenly returns from basic training. Asher has returned to find his missing sister, Camellia. And surprise! He finds out what what Shae’s hiding in the basement: her rot-ravaged mother, mindless and bloodthirsty after drinking the tainted water that failed to turn her into a vampire.

Asher blackmails Shae into taking him to see the Devil of the Gravewood so he can make a bargain of his own: Asher will assassinate Paris Keeling if Lys helps him find Camellia. Lys agrees, so long as Shae comes, too, as his guest to the party at which Keeling demands Lys’ attendance. Before they can set out on their hella awkward road trip from New England to Florida, the second of Shae’s only two friends, Poppy, is caught breaking into Shae’s house, bringing with her the blue butter cookie tin (you know the one) filled with the unsent love letters Shae had written to Asher. Yeah…things get awkward real fast.

Personal revelations come fast: Lys had been experimented on as a child, Poppy loves Camellia, there’s a bounty on Asher’s head as a deserter, Lys and Asher spend the entire time at each other’s throat, Shae, Asher, and Lys all cuddle in bed together, and Shae begins to understand just how much her parents sheltered her from the world.

Several near death incidents later, the crew makes it to Florida where, surprisingly, there are things more vile and Ron DeSantis. Shae runs away, attempting to hitchhike the rest of the way, but learns the hard way she doesn’t know how to read a map and gets in a car with a stranger immediately after a shouting match with Asher about her naiveté. She’s a genius, this one.

Shae eventually gets to the party and meets Paris Keeling, who looks eerily familiar, and finds Camellia, who has been infected with the rot. It, unsurprisingly, turns out that Keeling is in fact Lys’ father, and that Lys was the first person born with the rot and was raised as a god. The whole point of the revel is for Lys to shed the last of his humanity and become a true devil by forcing Lys to kill the rest of rest of the vampires to protect Shae as they hunt her.

And it works? Lys goes full devil vampire with horns all the while Asher reveals that this entire situation was a set up on his part because Keeling promised to give him his sister. Betrayal everywhere!

The vampire police show up and arrest Asher for desertion, and try to kill Lys, but not before Shae can do it herself. The book ends with Shae, Poppy and Camellia plotting to save the boys, in a clear opening for a sequel.

I love how toxic Shae’s relationship with Lys is. He’s a manipulative misanthrope who lied from the moment they met. He tells Asher to woo her and then sabotages his every attempt, he repeatedly pushes Shae away and then seeks her out twenty minutes later. Shae is addicted to the venom in Lys’s bite, telling him to bite her every time he looks sad. She never asks him any questions about himself and then gets mad when his secrets bite her in the ass. Neither of them know whether their attraction is real or a result of the connection that forms between a vampire and their victim after repeated bites. It’s so confused and messy and delicious.

Asher wants to be the strong silent hero/boy next door, but literally never tells Shae anything about his feelings. He shuts down almost every time Shae has a moment with Lys, and when he doesn’t, he shouts at Lys about Shae like she’s not standing right there. He didn’t even write her letters while he was in basic training. Shae literally does all of these things, too, and spent the entire time holding on to the childhood promise that they would leave their little town together without ever actually acknowledging that promise at any point ever.

Poppy is a delight. She’s perfect and I have no criticism at all. She loves her pet possum so much.

I say all of this with love. It was so much fun to see these messy characters play off each other, they’re all disasters in their own rights and I feel like I don’t get to see that very often, especially in a YA novel where the FMCs are usually perfect except they’re clumsy. Even Poppy gets messy at the end and I love that the only sane character finally starts to unravel.

Kelly Andrew’s writing is amazing. It feels remote, like a mirage, the language dreamy and ethereal and somehow far away, without losing any of its tension. It’s lyrical and poetic, making excellent use of botanical imagery both in describing the terrible trees of the Gravewood, and in the way it colors the journey south and reflects then feelings of the characters.

This book had all the things I hate: too angsty teens that don’t know how to process their emotions, too many miscommunications simply because people refuse to talk to each other, the love triangle that’s not really a triangle (though I hold out hope because there was definitely a vibe between Lys and Asher). But some how, Andrew made me love every bit of it. She subtly subverts the typical YA tropes in ways that you have to really look for, but are there in a can’t-quite-put-your-finger-on-it way that makes it all just work so, so well.

Shae isn’t miraculously good at everything all the time, honestly, she’s actively bad at most things and her naiveté gets her into trouble multiple times, and even when the boys swoop in to save her, it’s not clean and heroic. Lys isn’t the dark, mysterious love interest we’re all used to, he knows he’s not human and he knows that what he is is terrible and destructive, and he doesn’t try too hard to fight it, resigned to it destroying both him and Shae. Asher is a coward, he doesn’t even consider telling Shae what he’s really doing, and is willing to put her in harms way to get his sister back.

Poppy is still perfect and I really need Kelly Andrew to sell the scarf she spends most of the book knitting, because, yes, she’s knitting on their apocalyptic death-trap cross-country road trip.

I can’t tell you why this book worked so well for me, especially after Andrew’s other book, Your Blood, My Bones, didn’t hit for me, but it did. If you love ridiculously chaotic and sloppy people in ridiculously sloppy relationships in a crazy take on the end of the world with surprisingly good disability representation that has an actual impact on the story, then you might like The Gravewood, too.

Originally published: April 7,2026

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