You know perfectly well that gives me Harry Potter flashbacks. I cannot, and it is unfair for you to expect me to, handle a situation in an already emotional book in which a character I love walks into a creepy forest to meet his own death. If magic and creepy trees are things that interest you.

(It makes rereading fun! You reread and you’re like “Oh she told me this exact information in Chapter 4.” “Oh, Ronan has been saying this all along and nobody was paying any attention.”)Īlso, there’s magic and creepy trees. Maggie Stiefvater’s maybe-best trick as a writer is that she always tells you the spoilers herself, probably more than once, but when the big reveal arrives, you’re still surprised, because she told you what was going on, but you were too distracted by something else she was doing at the same time. Or conversely how eminently disappointing it would be to go into them spoiled. It’s funny that I started with a spoiler warning, because in fact one of my favorite things about these books is how unspoilable they are. The lovely thing is that Adam and Blue and Gansey are fully themselves in all the versions of all these conversations they are just getting better at it as they go along, in a lovely organic way. Compare the way Gansey is with Blue the first time they meet to the way he is with her - well, any time else, really, I just wanted to remind you of that whole President Cell Phone snafu because it remains one of my favorite scenes in the series. Compare, for instance, the chats about relationships Adam and Blue have in The Dream Thieves versus in The Raven King. That they are sometimes phenomenally bad at these things makes it all the more satisfying as, over the course of the series, they get better and better at being who they want to become. (how to be free, how to be happy, how to be a friend, how to make your life matter) Mostly what they are all looking for is How To Be.

Everyone else - Adam Parrish, who’s trying to be someone different and Ronan Lynch, who’s looking for true things in a world full of liars and Blue Sargent, the only non-psychic in a house full of psychics, who desperately wants something more - finds “looking for a Welsh king” to be a viable means of also searching for what they do want, so they are along for the ride. One of our protagonists, Richard Campbell Gansey III, 1 is looking for a Welsh king. Or more specifically, how to be a person when your world as it stands is not - is nowhere near - enough. The Raven Cycle is about figuring out how to be a person. I mainly want to tell you what I love so much about this book and this series. I will clearly mark the end of the non-spoiler-y part of the post, so that you can bail before I start shrieking about specific, spoilery things. The first part of this post will not contain spoilers for The Raven King, or indeed for any book in this series.

The raven king