About.com Rating



Psychics (good ones), ley lines, and ghosts, oh my! The Raven Boys starts off a new series from fan-favorite author Maggie Stiefvater, and boy does it start off well.

This is a nice, thick, meaty book, that somehow reads more quickly that its 400+ pages would suggest it should. It's packed with great characters, beautiful imagery, and fascinating background information that never weighs down the forward thrust of the narrative.

Publication Details

• Full Title:The Raven Boys
• Series: The Raven Cycle
• Author: Maggie Stiefvater
• Publisher: Scholastic Press
• Publication Date: 2012
• ISBN: 978-0-545-42492-9

Telling the Future

Blue Sargent is the daughter of a psychic, and the only non-psychic living in a house full of mother, mother's best friends, aunts, cousins, half-aunts, half-cousins, and so on. But while she may not see ghosts of the future, she acts a sort of amplifier, turning up the volume to the otherworld, so her mother can hear better, so to speak.

All her life, Blue has had predictions made about her future, and they all say the same thing: she's going to kiss her true love, and when she does, he will die. She never really worried about it until another half-aunt --a famous TV psychic -- shows up and then Blue sees a ghost for the first time. It's a boy her own age, and he's going to die. Because of her.

The boy she sees is a "raven boy," a rich, privileged student at the all-boys Aglionby Academy, so-called because the school crest is a raven, and all the boys wear it on their sweaters.

Her rules in life are: stay away from boys, and especially stay away from raven boys. But of course, rules are made to be broken, even our own rules, and Blue soon finds out hers aren't so easy to keep, under the right circumstances.

Four For A Boy

One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy . . .
~old folk rhyme

There's a lot of folklore about various and sundry people vanishing from Europe -- especially the British Isles -- and turning up in North America long before Columbus. Most of that folklore makes for pretty bad science and history, but it can be a great thing around which to build fiction. Stiefvater takes a Welsh folk hero, Owain Glyndwr (Owen Glendower, in English), who rebelled against English rule and then seemingly disappeared from history, and uses his story as a motive for her characters.

Like King Arthur, and assorted other legendary heroes, Glendower is said to sleep, hidden away, to be be awakened in the hour of greatest need. Or else he'll be awakened by whomever finds him first, to grant an unimaginably wonderful, and unspecified, favor.

The search for Glendower is the reason Gansey (who goes by his last name only, for reasons you'll learn in the book) decided to attend Aglionby, and though the book is full of this quest and its symbolism, The Raven Boys isn't really about the search. Instead, it's about friendship, and loyalty, and making your own way, and a bunch of other things. Or, rather, those things are in it. Really, it's about five characters -- four raven boys and Blue -- who are thrown together under peculiar circumstances, and have to figure out what to do.

Good Psychic, Bad Psychic

I had read Maggie Stiefvater's first published novel, Lament, so I expected The Raven Boys to be a good story, and well-written. Yet it still managed to surprise me. While Lament was excellent, especially for a first novel, The Raven Boys is masterful. It's very, very cool to see a writer you already like continue to improve at their craft.

The writing is fantastic. The settings are perfectly evoked in a way that made me able to visualize them, but that didn't take over the book. The background detail and information, while occasionally a lot to take in at once, is skilfully revealed through the characters and the natural progression of the story. I didn't notice any obvious "infodumps," which can be difficult to avoid when there's so much information that at least some of the characters already know.

But aside from the great writing, what really struck me was the characters. Stiefvater's skill with characterization was especially noticeable in two very different raven boys: Gansey and Adam. She managed to show us both a boy so rich he's clueless about money and doesn't understand why always offering to pay for things can be insulting to those who have less, and a poor boy, working himself ragged to pay for private school so he can escape his poverty and live life on his own terms. There was one flashback scene at a grocery store that had me in tears -- I've been there, and Stiefvater shows it perfectly.

Stories and Secrets (and Sequels)

Even if the only thing well-done in The Raven Boys was the characters, I'd still have to give it a high recommendation. But the writing, the sense of place, the dialogue -- almost everything -- was so well done it left me breathless. I'm trying not to gush too much, but The Raven Boys is a book I expect to see on a lot of "Best of 2012" lists.

On the other hand, though, for those who like a lot of action in their fiction, it may leave something to be desired. Even though a big part of the story is the search for the tomb of a lost king, it's not an action-adventure book. And if you don't like books that have loose ends at the end, well, you may want to wait until the rest of the series comes out.

Personally, I thought Stiefvater did a a good job of leaving plenty of unfinished business for the next books in the series, but still wrapping The Raven Boys up in a way that wouldn't leave most readers unsatisfied. Yes, it's definitely a series book, but it doesn't end suddenly in the middle of things. Not too much, anyway.



Disclosure: A review copy was checked out from her local library by the reviewer. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.