Review: The Raven Boys
16:19
By Maggie Stiefvater
Source: Personal purchase, paperback
Genres: Young Adult, Fantasy, Paranormal,
Goodreads Synopsis:
It is freezing in the churchyard, even before the dead arrive.
Every year, Blue Sargent stands next to her clairvoyant mother as the soon-to-be dead walk past. Blue herself never sees them—not until this year, when a boy emerges from the dark and speaks directly to her.
His name is Gansey, and Blue soon discovers that he is a rich student at Aglionby, the local private school. Blue has a policy of staying away from Aglionby boys. Known as Raven Boys, they can only mean trouble.
But Blue is drawn to Gansey, in a way she can’t entirely explain. He has it all—family money, good looks, devoted friends—but he’s looking for much more than that. He is on a quest that has encompassed three other Raven Boys: Adam, the scholarship student who resents all the privilege around him; Ronan, the fierce soul who ranges from anger to despair; and Noah, the taciturn watcher of the four, who notices many things but says very little.
For as long as she can remember, Blue has been warned that she will cause her true love to die. She never thought this would be a problem. But now, as her life becomes caught up in the strange and sinister world of the Raven Boys, she’s not so sure anymore.
I have really mixed opinions on this book. For the first half, I didn’t care about anything and found it really slow moving; yet for the last, I found it really engaging and loved the characters. One thing that I adored for the whole book was the plot. It was a really original idea, and one that I think many will enjoy.
My favourite aspect of the book was the characters. They were all instantly loveable as they all had such unique personalities. I cared about all of them from the very beginning of the book. One of the reasons I liked them so much was because we got to see the story through everyone’s eyes. The story was told in 3rd person, but it alternated POVs often. This was interesting and not confusing at all.
I think that the start could have been quicker. Because there was a lot of world building and info-dumping, I got a bit bored and had to struggle through it. Not much happened which also made me lose interest. I wasn’t invested in the story.
One of the things that surprised me when going into this book was the fact that there was barely any romance. Although this didn’t bother me at all, I found it odd because the tagline on my cover is “If you kiss your true love, he will die”, suggesting that it’s going to be all about this forbidden love. There was practically no forbidden love. Also, the 4th most popular genre for this book on Goodreads was Romance (usually these are correct), which puzzled me because it had much more of other genres.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book by the end even though I didn’t enjoy it at the start. I really liked the relationships between the characters, and would recommend this to fans of paranormal fantasy. I don’t recommend this book to you if you’re looking for a forbidden romance, because this book barely has any romance.
Me at the start of this book VS. me at the end:
My rating:
Hello! I'm D - a dog-loving feminist from the UK. You'll probably find me with my nose in a book or playing my clarinet
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