When I first bought this book it was really just to tick boxes for a deal considering the synopsis doesn’t exactly sell it to me ( I’ll let you check that out in your own time its too long to paste in here).
I read it on a camping trip and was hooked from day one, I’ll tell you why.
Maggie Stiefvater has a wonderful way of using character development, so much so that you can easily fall in love with every character and relationship. These books in particular make you want to find a really close mismatched group of friends and go a walk in a ~magical~ forest to discover dead welsh kings , go a drive late at night in a bright orange 63′ Camaro, street racing, visit large stately homes or go travelling for a year.
Basically the way this friendship group -Blue, Gansey, Ronan, Adam and Noah- evolves over the next four books is what kept me obsessed with this series.
One character in particular is my favourite to read about. Ronan Lynch, the rebellious teen who inherited a lot of money off his dad when he was brutally murdered for essentially selling magical objects on the black market. Ronan hates school and only turns up to see his friends once in a while, other than that he spends most of his time harnessing his dreamer powers at his family estate or mulling over the fact that he is in love with his best friend- Adam Parrish. He shows these emotions by rescuing Adam from his abusive dad, paying his rent etc.
The second book in the series- Dream Thieves- focuses quite heavily on these aspects of Ronan and how he copes with his traumatic childhood and poor relationship with his brother. We shortly meet Ronans enemy- Kavinsky- in this book, as in the end- after an explosive ‘battle’- he dies. We see a weird relationship form as the boys bond over their love for street racing and their shared ability to create objects in their dreams. Kavinsky is an angsty, confused teen who has had a similarly bad childhood and also faces some feelings towards Ronan which he squashes in a cruel way in order to not lose his ‘status’.
The third book- Blue Lily’ Lily Blue- is my least favourite. It’s relatively slow and the characters spend most of the time in caves looking for the dead welsh king and Blue’s lost mother. What I do like about this book is that we find out more about Gansey’s anxiety and how it affects him. He takes a panic attack at school and ends up finding comfort in his new friend Henry Cheng who teaches him how to deal with his anxiety and face his fears. The team also make a massive discovery about Gansey towards the end of the book but I wont spoil it too much. This book also develops one of the main relationship in the series (Gansey and Blue).
The final book-Raven king- is a satisfying end to the series however only in the last few chapters does it get exciting. The book follows the ‘unmaker’ the villain of the series which only appears in physical form in this book. The villain poses a threat to Ronan’s dreaming abilities and also the magical forest. It plans to completely wipe out all of society and start afresh, itself as the overlord. I’d be completely spoiling the whole plot and sub-plot if I told you what happened in these last few chapters, so i’m just going to hope I managed to sell this series to you and you decide to give it a chance and not judge a book by its blurb.
P.S- if you like Ronan’s story the most then Maggie has just recently released the first of the three books in the Dreamer trilogy- a series centred purely around Ronan. The book is called ‘ Call down The Hawk’
