The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater ~ 2012. This edition: Scholastic Press, 2012. Hardcover. ISBN: 978-0-545-42492-9. 409 pages.

My rating: It’s complicated. I’m giving it a 7/10, pending the next installment. Stiefvater’s a very fine wordsmith, and she’s showing some lovely talent here, but there were some issues I couldn’t ignore which had nothing to do with excellent quality of the prose.

If you want to read a proper review, the internet is alive with them. Goodreads has an abundance – over 7000 ratings and 2000 reviews. The ones I read on the first page alone were very nicely done indeed, so I won’t duplicate those here.

Here’s the blurb from the dustjacket; it’s as good an explanation of the premise of this book as any:

“There are only two reasons a non-seer would see a spirit on St. Mark’s Eve,” Neeve said. “Either you’re his true love . . . or you killed him.”

It is freezing in the churchyard, even before the dead arrive.

Every year, Blue Sargent stands next to her clairvoyant mother as the soon-to-be dead walk past. Blue herself never sees them—not until this year, when a boy emerges from the dark and speaks directly to her.

His name is Gansey, and Blue soon discovers that he is a rich student at Aglionby, the local private school. Blue has a policy of staying away from Aglionby boys. Known as Raven Boys, they can only mean trouble.

But Blue is drawn to Gansey, in a way she can’t entirely explain. He has it all—family money, good looks, devoted friends—but he’s looking for much more than that. He is on a quest that has encompassed three other Raven Boys: Adam, the scholarship student who resents all the privilege around him; Ronan, the fierce soul who ranges from anger to despair; and Noah, the taciturn watcher of the four, who notices many things but says very little.

For as long as she can remember, Blue has been warned that she will cause her true love to die. She never thought this would be a problem. But now, as her life becomes caught up in the strange and sinister world of the Raven Boys, she’s not so sure anymore.

From Maggie Stiefvater, the bestselling and acclaimed author of the Shiver trilogy and The Scorpio Races, comes a spellbinding new series where the inevitability of death and the nature of love lead us to a place we’ve never been before.

*****

And here are some ratings and personal opinions I’m jotting down, because I feel like I have to say something.

I liked this book. I didn’t love it, though. Steifvater’s last book, 2011’s The Scorpio Races – I think I can honestly say I loved that one. So my expectations for The Raven Boys, while high, were reasonable. I figured that this next one would be below the crest of the previous wave, and I was right.

So The Raven Boys was better than I’d really expected, but the author is going off an a totally different tangent here, and it’s a bit soon to see what the end result will be. With a four-book cycle projected, it could either get even better (oh, yes please!) or deteriorate. I can’t call it at this point. But I definitely would recommend The Raven Boys to the YA fantasy/paranormal romance crowd. I’m not in that demographic, though I do enjoy the odd well-crafted tale from the genre, but I appreciated this book enough to spend the better part of Christmas Day very happily power-reading through it.

Opening Chaper: 10/10. Nice set-up. Once a year, on St. Mark’s Eve, the dead-to-be – all those will die in the coming year – are visible as spirit manifestations along the mystical “corpse road”, to those with the psychic powers to penetrate the veil between the spirit and living world.  The members of the extended family of (all female) psychics living together in a rambling old house in Henrietta, Virginia have those powers. All except for a non-gifted daughter, 16-year-old Blue. Blue comes along because her one power is that she “boosts” the psychic powers of the others. In her many years tagging along on St. Mark’s Eve, she’s never seen one of the will-be-deads. Except tonight, when one boy appears to her and names himself – “Gansey.” When Blue finds out that this vision means Gansey is either her true love, or she will be the cause of his death, she files that startling bit of news with her other long-held bit of foreboding knowledge: if she kisses her true love, he will die. Needless to say, this severely cramps Blue’s style romance-wise. Too bad she’s about to meet some very tempting potential lovers – the Raven Boys – a group of four friends from the town’s exclusive boys’ school. One of whom is named, inevitably, Gansey.

Characterizations: 10/10 for the heroic leads – Blue and Raven Boys Gansey and Adam. A meager 6/10 for the villains – Whelk (“Whelk”?! Seriously?) and Adam’s brutal father. Too obviously bad. No shadings. The ones who we’re not sure of – Ronan and Neeve – let’s give them an 8/10. Could go up or down. Raven Ghostly Boy Noah – he started out as a 2 or something like that, crawled up to about a 7 or 8 once he started to de- and re-materialize and his whispers showed his sense of graveyard humour.

Family Stuff: We had the range, from really pretty tight and reasonably awesome (Blue’s, Gansey’s, Noah’s) to dysfunctional but trying hard (Ronan’s) to literally call-the-cops terrible (Adam’s). So I’ll give a 9/10. Lost a point for the convenient but kind of annoying extreme wealth of Ronan’s and Gansey’s tribes. (Sure, it’s just jealousy.) Oh – and the missing father (Blue’s) who I’m sure will turn out to be crucially crucial in a later episode – duly noted that he’s in the mix and will likely show up in person.

The Quest: 4/10. Ley lines and the North American burial-place of a mythically sleeping, potentially wish-granting Welsh King – meh. Cop out, Maggie. I’m a bit jaded with the whole Celtic mythology thing. Couldn’t you make something up? Or use some North American-based folklore?

Neat Little Details: 10/10 – Gansey’s choice of ride, the ’73 Camaro – unexpected. Especially the detail about the car perpetually smelling like gas. They really do. Verisimilitude = perfect points. The helicopter pilot sister – nice and handy. I liked. The warehouse digs. Very cool. Blue’s personal style. The “normal” of the matter-of-fact acceptance of Maura being the “town medium”. The psychic hotline.

The Pacing: 5/10. Pretty darned slow. I know it’s setting up the back story for – get this – THREE more books, but it felt like molasses on a cold January day. (And I’m a fast reader.) I wish this could be cleaned up, tightened up somehow. Less is so often more. (But I know how hard it is to edit – look at the horribly long reviews I write. It’s a definite fault in a professional she-gets-paid-for-it writer, though. Don’t get me started on J.K. Rowling’s too-much-detail verbosity in the later Harry Potter books.)

Sexual Tension: Oh, let’s see. About a 20/10. That should keep the main fan base (teen girls) fully engaged. No kissing allowed because of the whole death thing, so every tiny touch is magnified about a million-fold. Is it hot in here? Why yes, yes, it certainly is. Oh yes.

Annoying Little Things: The Latin-speaking trees. The baby raven – “Chainsaw”. Too cute. The backhoe in the last chapter. Too unlikely – I’m sure someone would notice the inevitable disturbance left by the amateur operator. The whole time-shift thing, because it wasn’t really that well done or, quite frankly, all that believable. The fact that the cops couldn’t seem to find Noah’s car, though you’d think that after they were tipped off to the human remains they’d be doing a fairly wide sweep through the woods. Just maybe? Other stuff I can’t be bothered to type out. So a 3/10 for those bits.

The Ending: Boo, hiss. Not exactly cliffhanger; more like “is a page missing?” Maddening. *** It. Just. Stops. *** C’mon. If it’s a great read, we’ll buy the next book even if you toss us some sort of a wrap-up to the action so far. The Dead Stop feels manipulative and disrespectful to the engaged reader. So a 1/10 for that.

The Actual Writing: It’s good. Very good. Plus it’s frequently very funny. 11/10. I think Stiefvater is already doing well, but I’m betting she can get even better. I’m rather disappointed that she’s doing such an ambitious series, because it feels really rambling already. I think the discipline of the solitary stand-alone novel (yes, like The Scorpio Races) would be a better way for her to refine her already more-than-decent style even more.