Title(s): The Raven Boys (2012), The Dream Thieves (2013), Blue Lily, Lily Blue (2014)(audiobook)

Author: Maggie Stiefvater
Narrator: Will Patton
Publisher: Scholastic Audio
Genre: Teen/YA speculative fiction/fantasy (literary)

♥♥♥♥♥ Great titles to add to your YA literacy booster lists

This review combines the first three books of Maggie Stiefvater’s series,  The Raven Cycle.

Blue Sargent, a girl with a newly awakened gift, joins three unlikely companions on a journey to find the power that threatens to consume the lives of her friends, family, and the real world she has always counted on.

The story begins when Blue, the only nonseer in a house filled with clairvoyants and psychics, suddenly sees one of the dead during the annual churchyard watch. From that moment on, she finds it impossible to resist the conspiracy of two worlds, the magic and the real, determined to draw her in to the mysterious plight of the spirit boy in the Aglionby Academy jacket.

When a group of Aglionby students, known as Raven Boys, comes to her family for assistance in another supernatural matter, Blue becomes

involved in a grand magical quest to wake a sleeping king that brings chaos and tragedy into the real world. By helping Gansey, rich and handsome, yet so achingly human, Blue may save him– as long as she can resist falling in love with him. Along the way, she gets to know the fantastical convergence of characters in Gansey’s life and finds them soon irreplaceable in her own. Ronan, as wild as his pet Raven; Adam, shackled to his past yet always struggling to free himself; and Noah, as insubstantial as a sigh, but the rock that anchors them all. The four of them may be on individual journeys, but each fate is inexorably intertwined with the fortunes of all the others.

I enjoyed reading this series on many levels. The story (across the three books that I have read) is complex, human, and brutal in its realism at times, yet perfectly blended with such magic (more King Arthur than Harry Potter) that it transports the reader completely. The characters are created with equal shares human charm, vulnerability, and mysticism, and are so complete that they stood in the kitchen with me as I did dishes. These wonderful elements come to life in the deftly constructed fantasy/real duality of the Raven Boys’ physical world. I am looking forward to the next book!

Read this series to be transported to places you may have been (but never like this) with people you may have always known (but never known like this).

To Maggie Stiefvater: You remind me why I love to read. Write more!