Blue has grown up as the only normal person in a house full of psychics. All her life she's been told that the first time she kisses her true love, he will die. It never seemed real to Blue, until she encounters the spirit of a young man in a churchyard, who is destined to either be her true love, or to be killed by her own hand. The tiny town of Henrietta, VA, doesn't have much claim to fame: just the elite boy's boarding school (Aglionby, whose crest--a raven--gives its students their nicknames, Raven Boys). Blue's ghost is a Raven Boy, and Raven Boys seldom interact with townies, so it should be easy to avoid them, shouldn't it?
As you can imagine, the story doesn't really take off until Blue inevitably crosses paths with a group of Raven Boys: Adam, a local boy attending Aglionby on scholarship; Ronan, whose father died the year before under mysterious circumstances; Noah, a quiet shadow of a teenager; and Gansey, a wealthy treasure hunter who's set his sights on Henrietta as his next big discovery. Gansey has enlisted his friends to help him find the burial place of Glendower, a half-mythical Welsh king believed to be buried in the mountains of Virginia. Legend has it that the person who wakes the sleeping king with be granted a powerful gift, and as Gansey's group (aided by Blue) draws closer to the truth, they start to encounter other, darker searchers in competition.
I admit, I was underwhelmed with Stiefvater's last few books, but I was so in love with her contributions to The Curiosities, that I decided to give her another try. What I figured out is that I just need to be more patient with her longer books: I loved this, but it's not a fast read by any stretch of the imagination. There's not a lot of action here, but there's enough great character development and real life issues to make it a compelling read. It was worth reading the whole book just to get some of the gorgeous imagery that's included here (Cabeswater, in particular is amazing!). There's a lot of groundwork laid in this volume, and while the ending was a little cloudy, I'm eagerly awaiting the next installment in this series.
No comments:
Post a Comment