The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater Review

Hi ForeverBookers, 

Yesterday, I finished reading “The Raven Boys” by Maggie Stiefvater and if I’m to be honest, I expected a LOT more. This review will therefore be quite short because I didn’t feel that there were many significant points. I seemed to enjoy the authors Shiver series a LOT more, which was a shame as I’d heard SUCH good things about “The Raven Boys”.

2.5 Stars (rounded up to 3 on Goodreads)!

I read “The Raven Boys” for a few of readathons: 

“A book involving a heist” for the Popsugar Reading Challenge. (I’ve unfortunately lost all of the books that I’ve read for Popsugar so I don’t know if I’ve already completed this goal or not :/). I don’t think I marked this one off the list previously though. Although it’s not a heist of goods, the characters are trying to steal the magic that Glendower found years before. That counts as a heist to me! 

“A book on my TBR” for the Litwits, Detective Challenge on Facebook. The book has been on my TBR for a couple of years so I’m glad that I finally did read it, even if it wasn’t all that I wanted it to be. I was also buddyreading it for this group, as well.

“Author Highlight” for Reading Rivalry, as a part of the Townsville Readers on Facebook. It’s the first time I’ve read the author highlight category. 

"A book with a bird on the cover" for the HouseViking team because there clearly is a bird on the cover and in the title. 

Spoilers Below

We start with Blue, the main female character of the series. Her family is made up of psychics. “Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she’d been told that she’d kill her true love.” This is the first line of the book. It sets up the premise for the rest of the series, I believe. The book keeps going back to this point, at least 3 times within the book. It was necessary to be reminded of this but I don’t feel it needs to be brought up quite as much as it seemed to be. Maybe once in the middle as well as the beginning but nowhere else. Blue doesn’t kill “her true love” within this book, anyway.

Blue lives with her mum and aunts. She doesn’t know who her father is. This is a contentious subject within “The Raven Boys”. Again, we don’t actually find out who Blue’s father is. It’s just setup for the Dream Thieves where it’ll perhaps be revealed. “Blue’s father disappeared right after she was born” is all we really get. This leaves the story wanting something, I think. I think that Blue’s father will play a bigger role in the future books. I hope so, anyway. I found Blue’s aunts and her mother really annoying, if I’m to be honest, again. They didn’t add anything to the story for me. In fact, the story probably would have been better for me without their input!

The Raven Boys themselves were the significant characters, along with Blue, as the title would lead you to believe. I could really tell the author’s concentration was spent on these characters, rather than developing the minor characters, which was fine. “Gansey was the boy she either killed or fell in love with. Or both. There was no being ready.” This was one of the main points of development throughout the story, but AGAIN it had no conclusion in “The Raven Boys”! I thought that Gansey would end up in a coma or something at the end of this book, but that didn’t happen. The other characters didn’t really pull me in, either. Other than Blue and The Raven Boys they were all pretty bland. This is where having a small cast of characters doesn’t really work because the characters aren’t really expanded on much and in a character driven story we need that to be the main point of development, I feel. The Raven Boy that I did like was Noah. There’s another mystery that surrounds him. He was killed by a character in the book years before the events of “The Raven Boys” and so is a ghost in the book. Gansey, Adam and Ronan don’t know this though until about half way through, when they come across his remains on their mission to find Glendower, the Welsh King. This was pretty unbelievable. Wouldn’t you know if one of your best friends wasn’t alive, anymore. I’d like to think I would. 

The story that DID get a lot of time in this first book, was the Raven Boy’s search for Glendower, the Welsh King. I thought that maybe too much of the plot was based around this search and not enough in other areas. The antagonist of “The Raven Boys,” Whelk is also trying to find Glendower. We don’t know why these characters are trying to find the Welsh King in this book, though. Finding Glendower seemed to be a little bit like geocaching to me. That’s what I thought of when I read the searching parts. 

Overall then, I thought that “The Raven Boys” was a lot of setup and not much payoff. There were far more questions than answers given in this book. That’s why I’m only giving it 2.5 Stars! I REALLY hope that I’ll prefer the Dream Thieves and the rest of the series, which I’ll probably get to sometime next year!

Next I hope to read another book for Popsugar as well as for Reading Rivalry. I’ve already reviewed it so when I’ve finished it, I’ll let you know IF I read it or not and I’ll link my old review and let you know if I still agree with my past thoughts or not. Until then...Happy Reading!

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2585165945 - This review on Goodreads!