Poudelivre

It wasn’t very long ago that I found out about Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Boys and it wasn’t very long ago that I read it and came to the conclusion that it was very good. So it was only natural to go after the second book, The Dream Thieves, to see if that was as good as its predecessor. I had great hopes, which is usually the worst thing to have when you start reading a new book, but sometimes, the expectations actually live up to the real deal.

In The Raven Boys we’re introduced to Blue, a non-psychic girl in a very psychic family. After hearing all her life that if she kisses her true love, he will die, she sees the spirit of a boy walking on the corpse road on St. Mark’s Eve, and when a non-seer sees a spirit on that day, it either means that he’s your true love or you killed him. That boy turned out to be Gansey, a seventeen year old boy attending to Aglionby, a private school for very rich boys, and Blue has a rule to stay as far away from them as she can. But after getting to know Gansey and his friends, Ronan, Adam and Noah, the five of them form a bond and a friendship. Together, the five of them goes out in search after Gansey’s mysterious welsh king, Glendower. They wake up the ley line that runs through their little town and as a reader, we’re then hurled into The Dream Thieves.

The ley line is awoken again by Adam’s sacrifice and Neeve is nowhere to be seen, but the search for Glendower continues. But there are so many secrets in their lives and one after the other, they come up to the surface, and for the most part, it’s nothing good. Going against her rule, Blue realizes that she loves hanging out with the boys, but she hasn’t yet to understand exactly how dangerous that can be. And out of the four raven boys, Ronan is the most raven and thus the most dangerous.

Since this is a series, looking back, The Raven Boys was more the foundation for the rest of the story. Like the spring board. You learned a lot, but far from everything. And one thing you didn’t really learn that very much about, was Ronan. Of course, he was the character I found most interesting while reading the first book. Imagine how glad I was when realizing that the second book was practically all about him. You got a real insight to who he was and how he thought and more to why he was the way he was. He’s a very complex kind of character, something resembling a stone. Hard and cool on the outside, but when you break it in two, you find quite more than you’d first imagine inside. That makes good reading and it also makes Stiefvater a good writer.

What also makes her a good writer is the way she types, which is different from anything I’ve read before. I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, but there’s a certain flow to her words, and to the entire story. It’s both scary and funny and wonderful all at once. From times I wanted to close my eyes and hide away and the next moment I couldn’t get enough and I kept reading even though I should’ve stopped a long time ago. And reading books like that is fun, when you can’t stop thinking about them and can’t put them down.

These two books a very specific type of book that I’m sure won’t work for just anyone, but possibly more than one would think. Because it’s not about believing, it’s about finding it interesting in the first place. There’s so many impossible things happening, especially in The Dream Thieves, with ley line and psychics and ghosts and of course, the ever-present search of the sleeping Glendower, that you kind of need to like paranormal stuff and magic and things that just doesn’t happen in every-day life. Now if you like all that, this is definitely the book for you. And if you don’t? You should really give it a try anyway, because if ghosts and predictions and sleeping, ancient kings aren’t your thing, Stiefvater’s writing is glorious anyway and I would hate for anyone to miss out on that. And also, the cover is absolutely gorgeous. All in all, a very good story.