The Raven King

I suppose expectations are both the worst and best thing when it comes to books. It feels like no matter what you do, expectations will always be there in one way or another. Of course it’s better when you have none – or only bad ones –  when you start reading something. Worst, obviously, and most commonly I think, is to have high ones, or at least a certain degree of mediocre hopes. I had many expectations when it came to Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven King, and just as a lot of times before I’m left feeling hollow and sad when the book didn’t quite reach up to the heights I’d already put it on.

Three books ago we met Blue Sargent, Richard Gansey, Ronan Lynch, Adam Parrish and Noah Czerny for the very first time. They were different; a psychic’s daughter, a rich boy, a dreamer boy, a trailer boy and a dead boy. But somehow they all found each other and joined Gansey on his quest to find a sleeping Welsh king somewhere in Virginia. They’ve met horrors and nightmares and woken sleeping people and seen a magical forest and solved a gruesome crime and managed to fall in love. But this is the end and it is a nightmare.

Blue has always known that she’s to kill her true love with a kiss. Gansey has known for almost a year now that he is to die before next St. Mark’s Eve. Ronan is a dreamer but no longer the strongest force out there. Adam has to continue learning about magic himself after Persephone past away. Noah is decaying further and turning into something the others barely even recognize anymore. All five of them have to figure out what’s out in the magical forest of Cabeswater, what’s eating it away and turning it into a terrifying darkness while still searching for Gansey’s king Glendower. But there’s something out there that’s destroying all Gansey and his friends love and the only way to stop it is to give everything up.

This is the last part of The Raven Cycle, the one were everything is to be revealed and put together. Given a proper end and leave the reader satisfied with not just one book but a series of four. Did Stiefvater do this? I honestly want to say no. I was not caught off guard as much as I thought I would be with the entire story but rather something like annoyed – but not quite – with the end. It did not have the power that I thought it would, it didn’t dazzle me in any way. It actually happened really fast and the there was a relatively long epilog were I only felt like I missed out on the good stuff to read things that was interesting, it’s true, but wasn’t as interesting as, I don’t know, hearing about all the details in that last part of that last chapter. A few things were hinted at and others were left out entirely in the end and in some books that’s okay with me but in this case I wanted to know what happened to all the character’s I’ve come to love.

I felt like Stiefvater left a lot of clues along the way but either expected me to figure it all out (impossible) or just wanted to leave it all up in the air for the sake of mystery. In any way I don’t feel happy about it now, if anything I feel robbed. This is a novel I’ve waited for since spring last year and so I had hoped it would satisfy me completely but it didn’t.

Maybe I just feel empty and melancholy now since I know the series is over and maybe I will feel different about it tomorrow or next week or next month. But right now I’m disappointed. It was still Stiefvater-magic, with golden moments between Gansey and Ronan and tender moments between Ronan and Adam and fun moments between Ronan and Blue and sweet moments between Blue and Gansey and Noah was still a little sweet and a little creepy and 300 Fox Way was still awesome if a bit subdued after Persephone passed away. I still laughed at times and was freaked out at other times and generally liked the tone, but it felt like Stiefvater rushed through it all. Like some small, human moments between the characters were cut out because this is the last book and everything has to fit together now. The past three books have been about all of their lives and the chase after Glendower but now it felt like it was less about the characters and more about that thing that threatened to destroy everything.

I’ve always loved these books because they felt so real, despite all the magic and weirdness. The characters were real and loveable (well, almost all of them were loveable). It saddens me that they didn’t get to be that way completely in this novel and I might have expected a lot but was it too much to expect this?

It was a nice ending to the series and I’m glad I now know everything that was going to happen, but when I think about The Raven King I feel empty and I know that I won’t return to it for a while, possibly a long time. I need time to accept that it ended like this and that it wasn’t quite worth all the hope and longing I’ve felt while waiting for it.