I fell in love with The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater

In my final year of university I was told I needed to compile a reading list of all the current and popular young adult fantasy fiction to help me write my own novel for my dissertation, and on that list I added The Raven Boys, a recommended read on the Waterstones website.


I admit, I never got around to reading The Raven Boys during the academic year but I bought it anyway. After my Creative Writing course finished and I finally had the freedom to read and write for fun - oh! For fun! What a luxury that was - I picked up The Raven Boys again and gave it a read.

I was hooked. Pure and simple, it rekindled my love for reading and I found myself scouring the shelves of my local Waterstones for The Dream Thieves, the next book in the series. Fast forward a couple of months and I also had Blue Lily, Lily Blue and The Raven King in my possession.

It's hard to say what got me hooked. But then again, I suppose it's the easiest thing to tell you. Without giving too much away, The Raven Cycle books follow a girl called Blue Sargent who has been told all her life that she will kill her true love. Fate throws her into the path of the raven boys - a set of student bent on finding the legendary Welsh King Glendower.

There's nothing I love more than a good plot-driven story and yet the story wasn't my favourite part of this series. I never have, and probably never will, find a set of characters I love more than the main bunch from The Raven Cycle. We first meet Blue, a lovable, strong-minded and purposefully unusual girl who believes all students from Aglionby Academy are pompous, over-entitled twits. Then enters the pompous, over-entitled Aglionby Academy twits Gansey (Richard "Dick" Campbell Gansey III), Adam, Ronan and Noah, who really aren't that at all. Well. Gansey is a little but he's working on that.

It was so easy to fall in love with the characters in a slow, barely noticeable fashion until I was thinking about them and their lives even when the book was closed. Even the seemingly unlovable characters had such a charm to them that I couldn't help but laugh at their dry humour. Ronan has such a personality that it's hard not to love his arsehole attitude, particularly when it's paired with his undying loyalty to his friends and family. There wasn't a single main character who I felt the same way about at the end of the series as I did at the beginning.

I can't sing Maggie Stiefvater's praises enough. She really did rekindle my love for reading. Her writing style is so easy to sink in to. There's a particular written voice that I really enjoy; the lighthearted, slightly sassy tones found in other writers like Sir Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones. Even in a serious, sometimes morbid moment, a lighthearted comment isn't too far behind in The Raven Boys and its sequels to make that moment manageable.

In the later books especially, there's also the real sense of suspense. One of the main themes in the series is the fleetingness of things; how one moment something is there and then it's not, as if it never was. Stiefvater sets up many moments throughout her novels to make it seem as if something terrible is going to happen, that the audience knows is meant to happen, and then suddenly it does without warning, or it doesn't at all, or something entirely different happens all together.

I shed real tears at moments I knew had to happen and definitely at one that I never expected at all, which really put the reality that death could strike anyone into both the characters and myself; I felt like no one was safe, and Stiefvater plays on that a lot. I openly admit that I had to put The Raven King down for a week or so when I was about half way through because I couldn't deal with all the possibilities that the ending might have.

Finally, I think I'll have to say - otherwise I might go on forever - that The Raven Cycle really opened my eyes to a fairly new subgenre of fantasy. The blurb of The Raven Boys talks about an old Welsh king, and I'm absolutely not a history buff and if it hadn't been put on my dissertation list I probably never would have given it a proper glance. But I'm glad I did.

The Raven Cycle books are set in Henrietta, a small town in West Virginia and most of the problems that the characters face there are real and plausible and... real. But Stiefvater carefully mingles in fantastical elements through the psychics who live at 300 Fox Way, Blue's home, and weaves reality and fantasy together in a way that makes it almost natural and believable. People who steal from dreams and people who sleep for hundreds of years, a family curse and a lover's curse, time as a circle and wanting something more.

Though The Raven Cycle saga is over, there were some ends left loose by the final pages of the final book, I believe intentionally, so there may be chance for more to come. Something more. Also, I snooped through Stiefvater's tweets and found this pearler:

A brief reminder of why I won't be talking about the Ronan books as I write them:https://t.co/uTltRiD1KV pic.twitter.com/2cJKSS31K2

— Maggie Stiefvater (@mstiefvater) September 24, 2016

So needless to say I'm super excited. I don't care how long I have to wait. If you want to get your hands on The Raven Cycle books, you can grab them from your local bookstore or online and I absolutely recommend you do.

The Raven Boys; The Dream Thieves; Blue Lily, Lily Blue; The Raven King

Well, I'm sad it's all over for now. Though I'll keep the books forever. They'll sit proudly on my shelf and maybe I'll read them again in the future, regarding them in the beginning as I now do, knowing the end.

Though now it's time to read a new set of books; Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings, I think. A real classic fantasy tale.