The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater (Books 1-4)

 

*This review will contain mild spoilers for this series.*

I have spent the past few weeks making my way through The Raven Cycle books by Maggie Stiefvater. This young adult urban fantasy series is very well-loved in the reading community, so I was excited to see what it was all about. As I started reading though, I quickly realized that I wasn't going to be a big fan of these books. They were well-written, but really not my cup of tea. I still wanted to complete them all, for the sake of my Finally in 2022 Challenge, so I decided to power through them all and combine my reviews into one post. 

All four books in the Raven Cycle are set in the small town of Henrietta, Virginia, and follow five main characters over the course of about a year. Four of the characters, Gansey, Ronan, Adam, and Noah, have been friends for years. They attend a prestigious prep school together and spend all of their free time pursuing an unusual quest. They want to discover the tomb of an ancient Welsh king named Owen Glendower. It is rumored that anyone who finds the tomb will be able to wake Glendower and get a wish granted. Gansey has been obsessed with finding him for years and has led his group of friends on all sorts of adventures in pursuit of it. The town of Henrietta is on a ley line that is charged with supernatural energy, so the boys have been focusing their search on exploring the line and looking for places that Glendower could be hidden on it. While they have managed to find some clues here and there, their progress has been limited. Things pick up, however, when they meet the fifth character, a girl named Blue Sargent.

Blue is from a family of psychics. Her mother and aunts are all able to see the future and explore the past through things like tarot cards, scrying, and sometimes just touching different objects. Blue herself, however, has never shown any psychic abilities. Instead, her special power is that she enhances the powers of others through her presence. She's essentially a battery that can charge up other people's abilities when she is nearby, so this makes her helpful to her mother and aunts when they are performing readings for people. The first book begins with her assisting one of her aunts on St. Mark's Eve, a special day where the spirits of everyone in Henrietta who will die in the upcoming year make a trek across the ley line. Blue is surprised on this night to actually see a spirit - usually only those with psychic abilities can actually see them. She sees the spirit of Gansey, whom she has never met in real life, and her aunt tells her that this means she will either fall in love with him or will kill him. She promises herself that she won't do either, but that doesn't stop her from being very intrigued by his spirit.

Eventually, Blue meets Gansey and the rest of the boys and they become fast friends. Her ability to strengthen supernatural powers proves to be useful in their quest to find Glendower, and they suddenly start finding very promising leads. Across the course of all the novels, the group gets closer and closer to their goal and the boys begin to realize that they are more than just amateur archaeologists - they each have some powers of their own that they are just starting to understand. At the same time, other forces that are interested in finding the tomb themselves begin to present deadly opposition. They threaten not only Glendower, but the entire supernatural balance of the ley line. Of course, Blue and Gansey fall for each other too, and Blue must grapple with the secret knowledge that she knows he is destined to die sometime during the year. Together, the group must work together to find Glendower and protect Henrietta from those that would destabilize it, and hopefully find a way to defy fate and save Gansey's life.

 

So, as I started off saying, these books weren't bad, but they definitely weren't for me. I think I just don't like urban fantasy, so I was never that invested in the story. Psychics, hallucinations, and extremely ambiguous supernatural abilities just aren't my preferred tropes, and that's basically what the entire story revolved around. The story was complex and filled with this uncertain, ill-defined magic, and I consistently found myself having trouble remembering details. I would never remember what was going on in between times when I picked up the book too--when I would start a new day of reading, I would always be asking myself, "Okay, where was I? Who is he? What are they doing? Where are they?" Nothing wanted to stick in my head for some reason. I also couldn't really remember which events occurred in which book. Each of the books does have its own story arc, but they didn't feel clearly defined as I was reading. Everything kind of flowed together in my mind. If you asked me to summarize just one of the books by itself right now, I couldn't do it.

There were some little things about the characters that irked me too. The writing was good, but everyone in the story was a little too cool and sarcastic for my taste. They were all spouting off perfectly snarky comebacks and darkly comedic observations all the time. They were teens that talked like jaded, world-weary adults. The relationships between them all were layered, and complex though, so that kind of saved them for me. Stiefvater did a nice job with that aspect - they definitely all felt like unique individuals with their own stories--I just wasn't terribly interested in their stories. There were also some lines in there that haven't aged well and betrayed a rather careless, mean attitude about different kinds of people. Someone is described as having the "hollow eyes of a refugee" for example. That character is later referred to as a "foreign import." This didn't happen a lot, but I noticed it happening from time to time and it annoyed me. It's probably more due to Stiefvater trying to make the characters sound too cool than it is due to any actual racist beliefs, but it was still distasteful.

On a positive note though, the books were definitely a good young adult urban fantasy series, and I could tell that as I was reading even though I personally didn't love them. They were well-written with memorable characters and a very intricate plot. People that are into urban fantasy novels with dark, edgy teens will probably love these, but they weren't for me. I was ultimately glad to have tried the series though, just to know what all the cool kids are talking about.

Challenge Tally

Finally in 2022 - Series Edition: 21/28

Total Books Read in 2022: 49