The Raven Boys
The Raven Cycle, Book 1
Maggie Stiefvater
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Fantasy/Romance
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: If you kiss your true love, you will kill him.
All her young life, Blue Sargent has been told this by her mother and other relatives, and she knows better than to doubt them. Unlike many modern charlatans, the Sargent women are the real deal, their predictions good as gold, for all that they usually couch their answers in vague terms for the paying customers. Of course, Blue herself doesn't have that gift; her ability, such as it is, merely magnifies the skills of others. She can't even see the ghosts when her mother makes the annual visit to the nearby churchyard on St. Mark's Eve, when the souls who will die within the next year pass through. But this year, Blue sees one of the spirits: a young man with an indistinct face, in the raven-marked school uniform of nearby elite Aglionby Academy. According to her aunt Neeve, there are only two reasons she would see that ghost and no other. Either the young man is her true love, or she kills him. But Blue has spent her life avoiding boys, and even if she didn't she'd know better than to mingle with the entitled snobs of Aglionby. So how could one of them be her true love?
For years, Gansey has been obsessed with the hunt for the legendary Welsh king Glendower... a search that led him to the small Virginia town of Henrietta and the Aglionby Academy, or rather to the nearby ley lines. Along with the anger-consumed Ronan, the quiet boy Noah, and the trailer park boy Adam struggling to turn a partial scholarship at Aglionby into a ticket out of an abusive home, he's scoured the countryside in search of clues to the king's whereabouts. Legend says that whoever finds him and wakes him will be granted a favor and special powers... but Gansey isn't the only one searching. When his path crosses that of a local psychic and her daughter, he may be on the verge of the breakthrough he's been dreaming of - or a danger he can't comprehend.
REVIEW: In the interest of full disclosure, I picked this up mostly because I was interested in Stiefvater's follow-up, Call Down the Hawk, and I hate coming into series (or worlds established by series) out of order if I can at all help it. Having read this, though, I'm wondering if I need to pursue the rest of the original Raven cycle.
Stiefvater's writing paints vivid images of a timeless Virginia countryside steeped in ancient powers and legends with Old World roots, filling her tale with characters that feel more like larger-than-life sketches, figures from a painting or epic poem, than true flesh-and-blood humans. The whole story feels dictated by prophecy and ley line magic and even a sort of mystic time travel and predestination, which robs the cast of some of their agency; they're basically swept up in greater events rather than charting their own course, and even when they think they're acting independently, it seems the forces of the universe are still a step ahead, twitching the strings. It made me feel a little manipulated, to be honest, and at parts the story feels forced as a result. (To further be honest, for all that it's one of the book's main selling points, the love angle and its associated angst struck me as one of the most manipulative aspects of all, but I can see where it would appeal to readers who like "impossible" loves and tense triangles involving broody, and more than occasionally emotionally oblivious, teens. It just went a bit over the top for my tastes.)
That said, there are some great descriptions, and the characters, for all that they're never quite human, are memorably evocative and emotional. I'm just not sure if it's worth my while to follow three more books where the outcome is already dictated. (Though I still am very interested in Call Down the Hawk...)
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