The Savage Grace (The Dark Divine #3) by Bree Despain
Release Date: March 13, 2012
Publisher: EgmontUSA
Source: Public Library
Rating: 
Buy It: Amazon
A troubled soul. An impossible choice. A final battle.
Wrestling with the werewolf curse pulsing deep inside of her, Grace Divine was finally able to find her brother, but it nearly cost her everything.
With her boyfriend, Daniel, stuck in wolf form and Sirhan’s death approaching, time is running out for Grace to stop Caleb Kalbi and his gang of demons. If she fails, her family and hometown will perish. Everything rests on Grace’s shoulders.
The final installment in The Dark Divine trilogy brings Daniel and Grace’s love story to a breathtaking conclusion. – Goodreads
Review:
Are you shocked that I’m still reading this series? Yes, I am, too. After the two books, I had to continue on. It’s like the Twilight series. I didn’t care about Breaking Dawn but I came that far. I had to know how it ended. This book picks up very quickly after the end of the second book, which is nice for continuation, but the more I think about it the more it makes me realize how much Despain packed into three books.
In the third and final book, Grace is dealing with the fact that her brother is running wild, her boyfriend is now a wolf, and that her mother is in the psych ward. Then around 100 pages into the novel, her father ends up almost on his deathbed in the hospital. It’s hard to be Grace, isn’t it? I’m not even being snarky; I would not want to trade spots with her at this moment in the novel, plus characters are always reminding her she is Grace Divine, daughter of a preacher, she must stay strong.
Along with the weight of being perfect on her shoulders, the fact that she is trying to save her boyfriend and her brother, she is also dealing with Talbot. Talbot, who in the second novel showed hints of liking her, openly betrays her trust in this novel because he now loves her. He even states that he made choices hoping that she would fall in love with him. I see why Despain did it, to show how loyal Grace is, but by this part of the novel she has everything going against her and the last thing that she needs to hear is that her friend is in love with her. She has no time for that shit. Or maybe this reviewer just has no time for that shit.
By this point we’re only about 27% the way through the novel. Again, Despain packs a lot of punch in a small amount of space. Again, not necessarily a bad thing, just a lot to process and think about. That being said, she overused certain YA tropes: the guy friend who doesn’t listen to the main character and keeps coming back because he doesn’t ever listen to her when she says no. Or the girl continuously making it clear who she chose. GIRL, WE GET IT. LETS MOVE ON IN THE PLOT.
I spent most of this book hate emailing Tina. Mostly because Tina taught me to read YA differently than I used to and because of this I complain to her. (She’s fine with it. Promise.) I wanted to really like this book. I did. The series started off on a good note, and then progressively just got worse and worse. That being said, I would read f
uture work from Despain. Her writing held me in and made it so I couldn’t put the book down. The characters just made poor life choices that made me want to throw my book across the room. Which I would have done assuming it wasn’t a library book, which in this case it was.
Am I happy with the ending? That is debatable. Although there were a few twists and turns throughout the series, to get to the end point I saw most of it coming.
Also, a personal pet peeve of mine throughout this series was this font. It bothered me throughout the series. To be fair I listened to the first book on my iPod, but the next two I read in book form and I couldn’t read them for long periods of time because the font started to hurt my eyes. That almost never happens to me. If anything, I get yelled at because I inhale books to the point I read them too fast without stopping. So to have to put a book down because of the font was not something I’m used to, or something I like for that matter.
