Grave Covenant by Tobias Youngblood

Blurb:

Ridley faces hell when his fiancee disappears, leaving only a cryptic note.

On a quest to get her back, his fate becomes intertwined with an insectile shapeshifter and an enigmatic, knife-wielding young girl with an agenda of her own.

If Ridley is to have a prayer at saving his fiancée, he will need the help of his strange new friends. For a god-like menace lurks deep beneath the Outskirts, waiting to add his bones to its collection. And Ridley’s fists won’t be enough this time …

He'll have to transform into something else entirely.

Review:

So… a few months later I finally got around to putting my thoughts down for “Grave Covenant” by Tobias Youngblood. It was a fun novel, with quite a lot of surprises lurking somewhere in the pages, ready to ensnare whoever reads it. And yet, it’s small in scope, yet seemingly grand. I liked how it was all put together.

Now, had I need to sell this to an urban fantasy reader, I’d give them these two sentences:

“Ridley, while searching for his vanished fiancee, picks up a throwing knife enthusiast and a human obsessed bug shapeshifter. Shenanigans happen.”,

before handing them the book and scurrying off before they can hand it back. In all seriousness, the rest of this review would be the answers to the questions they might have due to the two sentences not being enough to fully convey “Grave Covenant”.

To start off, we have Ridley, a boxer who wants to find his vanished fiancee, Iris, a nine-year old who loves throwing knives to a degree that scares me, and Ilyana, a shapeshifter who loves to watch humans doing anything. Literally anything. In terms of character growth, Ridley notices that he has some draconic abilities lying dormant in him, and on his quest to figure out what happened to his fiancee, he slowly starts using him, and accepts that the world is much larger than he thinks. Then there’s Iris, she wants to find her father, who also vanished. She loves the throwing knives she got from him, and, determined, sets off with them to go search for her father. It goes well enough, with her learning some street smarts, and picking up a shapeshifting companion. Iris learns about relying on others to help her reach her goal. As for Ilyana. She wants to experience humanity to its fullest. And that leads her on a dark journey, figuring out slowly how to become humanlike.

After that, there’s the plot. Ridley hears about a strange nightclub, and starts to think that it has something to do with his fiancee and her disappearance, and Iris stumbles onto Ridley a bit later in the same area. Meanwhile, Ilyana works there. And she wants to know everything about humans. Lots of shenanigans happen, and it leaves it on a hopeful note, with a promise for more in the next novel. The way that things were playing out, and the amount of surprising turns that sent me down a path of speculation and surprise, it was a lot. 

Lastly there's worldbuilding. It’s set in a world similar to ours, with magic existing but hidden from all the normals. And shapeshifters exist, with bodies being similar to the real thing, but not really. There’s also the lost creatures, the succubi and the dragons as well as their kin. However that’s not the full set of creatures, there’s much more hiding around somewhere in the book. It all works together.

Granted, the only downside of the novel is that it was too short, it could’ve fleshed parts of the world out better, with a bit more focusing on the aspects of the undead and a few other things. Though that is my own opinion, you’d have to read it yourself to build your own about “Grave Covenant”.

TLDR, if you’re looking for urban fantasy, boxing, and knives, this novel by Tobias Youngblood is for you.

As always, thank you for reading this really long overdue review, and I hope I’ve helped add another novel to your TBR list, or helped pick your next read. However, if I’ve not, I’d recommend you check out the rest of the site. There’s plenty of reviews that are set in urban fantasy or high fantasy or science fiction. Here’s a link to a random review on the site, and it might be for a book similar to this one, or it’s completely different. The only way to find out is to click it.

Wherever you are reading this, have a good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and good night!