If you like: contemporary magic, Welsh mythology, Kelly Armstrong, LJ Smith, Sarah Rees Brennan, the Wake trilogy.
The assembly of characters in The Raven Boys is what makes it a favorite for me. The four main teens are all vastly different. In the beginning, it seems like Gansey is the affable Mr. President Cell Phone, Adam is the sweet and shy poor kid on a scholarship, Ronan is the sharp, damaged, fatherless trope, and Blue is the quirky, witchy heroine. None of them are who they appear to be on the surface.
Blue, for example, grew up in a household of women closely tied to the supernatural, but she “truly was sensible. This was distressing. She felt like she’d done so much work to appear as eccentric as possible, and still, when it came down to it, she was sensible.”
Watching the intricate puzzle pieces of their personalities click together is bewitching. The boys, who all attend the same fancy private school, are deeply bonded and fight for each other. The strength of their friendship becomes their most important asset throughout the series, and I’m a complete sucker for it.
There’s a lot of mystery in The Raven Boys, built from the exploration of ley lines and Welsh mythology. Every corner turned brings a new sense of dread, darkness and magical possibilities. Stiefvater has a knack for taking supernatural components and making them feel grounded and real. The many women who live in Blue’s house are variations of psychics, and the lines between physical and magical are blurred in believable ways.
I enjoy that Blue, while living in such a magical place with magical women, doesn’t have her own psychic abilities. But, she does provide a magnification of the magic found in her hometown, useful for people with ties to the supernatural. Tarot readings are more detailed when she’s around, and ghosts are able to cross into the physical world when she’s nearby. Blue desperately wants to see and discover things on her own, without being used like a tool, and I love how she takes the needed steps to determine her own fate.
While The Raven Boys has a slow start, what keeps the reader moving ahead is Stiefvater’s atmospheric writing and dry sense of humor. The story takes place in West Virginia, set with majestic mountains and thick forest. It’s the kind of environment that anyone can walk into—or read about—and believe that something strange and supernatural can happen while there.
The Raven Boys is the first book in a quadrilogy. It’s the perfect beginning to an intricate story that gets more complex and darker with every installation. The characters in The Raven Boys seem so different than who they are in the fourth book, and I always love rereading it, getting chills that come from knowing what awaits them. A lot of terrible, wonderful, and terribly wonderful things are ahead.
"The Raven Boys" by Maggie Stiefvater; Scholastic; 2012.
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