Review: Disappointingly Short & Uninformative
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 02 24, 2013
Like Radiant, A Dark Grave was a novella that I should have skipped. Disappointingly short, it added very little, if anything, to my understanding of Gavin and the world Souders has created with The Elysium Chronicles.I did enjoy learning a little bit more about Gavin and his life prior to entering Elysium. After his father's death, which is mostly unexplained, he has been the main provider for his family. His younger brother, having been just a baby when his father was killed, has looked up to Gavin for his whole life, and Gavin sees himself as a bit of a father figure because of it. Knowing his mother and brother would starve without him, he feels the weight of that responsibility each time he heads out to hunt.That doesn't stop him from planning a dangerous trip to a supposedly haunted island though, where people have been known to disappear; the prospect of a bountiful hunt outweighs any downside that he can think of. So A Dark Grave informed me of Gavin's village's struggle with providing its residents with enough food. What it didn't tell me, which was something I also couldn't gather from Renegade, was why - what happens in the future that Gavin is responsible for feeding his family at such a young age? While I don't expect all of the answers in a novella, something - anything - would have been appreciated.I did find it interesting that Gavin wasn't really friends with Connor - he just happened to be the next best hunter, and someone he could trust with his secret; it kind of makes Connor's fate in Renegade that much more tragic. But, as with Radiant, as soon as I began to enjoy A Dark Grave for what it was offering me, it ended.