Review: The Raven Boys (Raven Cycle, #1)

Author: Maggie Stiefvater
Publication date: September 18th 2012
Publisher: Scholastic UK



The Raven Boys is not a book you can just breeze through and immediately forget. Once again Maggie Stiefvater wrote a story that refuses to be categorized, or even properly described. For me, discovering it and its characters was a slow process. It was like scratching off a lottery ticket when you have no coin to scratch with, so you use your fingernails, and it’s messy and infuriating right up until the point you uncover it all and realize you’ve actually won. That’s what The Raven Boys really are – bits and pieces that reveal themselves painstakingly and gradually, but that combine into a whole unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.

Blue Sargent comes from a family of seers. She lives with her mother and other women like her, but, although she amplifies other people’s talents, she is not a seer herself. When, on St. Mark’s Eve, she sees the spirit of a soon-to-be-dead boy dressed in Aglionby private school uniform, it can only mean one of two things: either he’s her true love, or she’ll be the one to kill him.
Richard Gansey is an Aglionby boy through and through – exceedingly rich, radiating self-assurance and power, a bit eccentric and completely obsessed with discovering ley lines and finding the resting place of a medieval Welsh noble, Glendower. He is also the boy whose spirit Blue saw on St. Mark’s Eve, which, according to everything her family believes, means his days are numbered.

As always, there was an all-American war hero look to him, coded in his tousled brown hair, his summer-narrowed hazel eyes, the straight nose that ancient Anglo-Saxons had graciously passed on to him. Everything about him suggested valor and power and a firm handshake.

Gansey proved to be the most elusive of Maggie’s characters. Somehow, as hard as I tried, I couldn’t quite see him clearly. The more I attempted to grow attached to him, the more ghost-like he seemed to me. I do believe this was Stiefvater’s intention, though, and it made the story that much sharper and the stakes that much higher. She managed to create that feeling of not being able to hold on to someone – fitting considering the axe above Gansey’s head.

Here’s something I want to make very clear: The Raven Boys is not a romance. Forget about the ‘if you kiss your true love, he will die’ line. I’m sure it will become important at some point in the series, but this book is strangely and refreshingly romance-free. Instead, it is full of ghosts and murderers, Latin-speaking trees, ancient rituals and baby ravens. It is the furthest thing from what I expected.

Admittedly, it took a while for me to warm up to it, but just as my patience was starting to wear thin, the fireworks begun and everything fell in its place. I believe Stiefvater paced The Raven Boys with the whole series in mind, which is perfectly fine by me because I trust her to make it all worthwhile, but I fear that some might find the first half far too slow.

As unique and breathtaking as this story was, something was missing from it, something I can only describe as Maggie’s spirit. She has a signature, that subtle thing that makes her books instantly recognizable and that makes her my favorite author in the world. That signature, the unique emotion present in all her books, is far less clear in The Raven Boys.

Those who used to complain about Maggie’s writing, calling it flowery and purplish, will have no such problems with The Raven Boys. I, on the other hand, feel that I’ve lost something I can’t quite name, and I can only hope it’ll return in the next book.