Archived Review: The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater

Originally posted to Dark Lady Reviews on November 6, 2012

Apologies for the short review and the brusqueness of tone, I originally reviewed the book on Amazon, because I wanted other readers of my interests to know that The Raven Boys is better than the cover and blurbs make it out to be.

Star Ratings
Characters: **** (4 Stars)
Character Development: *** (3 Stars)
Plot: **** (4 Star)
Writing: *** (3 Stars)
Overall: **** (4 Stars)
Age range recommendation: 13+

This is the first book by Stiefvater I’ve ever read, though she’s extremely popular in the UK and I’m assuming in America as well.  I ordered The Raven Boys on a whim because I needed another purchase to merit free shipping on some books for my dissertation, and it was new and caught my eye.  I had my doubts but read it anyway, and here is why I’m glad I did:

The cover of The Raven Boys featured a tag line of “if you kiss your true love, he will die,” and the back description went on about how “This is the year [Blue] will fall in love.” I was, therefore, a little worried that The Raven Boys would turn out to be a dark-but-uninspired teenage romance with hints of the supernatural but more emphasis on the love story than on “the sinister world of the Raven Boys.”

Much to my surprise and appreciation, The Raven Boys turned out to be a fascinating – and quite original – adventure story with only a bit of the obnoxious romance I was expecting. The Virginia setting was quite vivid, the characters were amusing, and the plot (privileged high school boys use their resources to track down an ancient Welsh king’s burial site, and a local girl with psychic blood gets drawn into their search through a mix of curiosity and fate) was well imagined.

The novel had plenty of faults: too many side plots running at once meant that the story-line seemed disjointed at times and the ending was rushed/not explained very fluidly, but these problems didn’t irk me as much as they could have since I genuinely enjoyed the mystery and atmosphere of the story. Stiefvater’s writing is neither noticeably brilliant nor glaringly awful, her characterizations can be pretty obvious at times, and the book falls into the YA trend of setting up for a sequel when the tale should have been told in a single, longer, novel. But it’s clear that Maggie Stiefvater tried hard to write an imaginative novel for teenagers, one which didn’t fall unimpressively into a tired-out genre, and I would say that she succeeds.

There is moral ambiguity; there is genuine angst about the role fate plays in a person’s life and choices; and there are reflections about family, friendship, loyalty, and sacrifice which will resonate with both young adult readers and we-who-are-technically-adults-though-we-hate-it. There is also a truly fantastic twist in the story, one which completely justifies what I originally thought was a terribly written character, and I will admit that I wanted to high-five Stiefvater through time and space when I realized that she had known what she was doing with that character all along.

I guess I would call The Raven Boys more of a supernatural adventure, a ghost story, or a boarding school mystery than a Young Adult romance. Sure, there are four boys who make one quirky girl seem like she’s the center of the universe (which is one of my least favorite trends in YA literature these days) but there are enough good bits to make up for that and to ensure that I will read the sequel whenever it comes out.