The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater

“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.

Why I Picked It Up

Thanks for reading Words Like Silver! Subscribe for free to support my work.

Subscribe Now

placeholder

Maggie Stiefvater is one of my favorite authors, and her grounded fantasy series The Raven Cycle is an odd one. I read the first book as an ARC (advance reader copy, for those of y'all not in publishing) and liked it fine, but thought it was weird and hard to get into.

But when I listened to it on audio, I was suddenly obsessed. By now, I think I'd like the series well enough if I went back to it in print, but I relish listening to it.

So this is a series review with a format recommendation. If you've calibrated yourself to my reading taste thus far, you might appreciate listening to this book instead of reading it as a paperback or eBook. In my experience, it's such a slow-build read already that you get the full impact of it when you're really going over the cadence and delivery of each line rather than absorbing it on the page—but maybe that's just because I'm a fast enough reader that the conscious stretching of the book helped me out more.

I started this series on audio for the first time as a camp counselor in the Appalachian Mountains, listening on my iPod with headphones in a dark cabin when my campers were asleep.

Part of me will always associate it with long, solo road trips through the valleys of Virginia and the South, a landscape familiar to the book. For that reason, this series reminds me of the smell of rain, and thunder building over the pines, and all the sensory pleasures of summer in the South that make me nostalgic for it as soon as I press play. Most recently, I finished re-listening to the first book for the first time in a couple of years at a rest stop in South Carolina where I had to pop in for a Cheerwine—not for the taste (far too sugary), but because that felt right.

The Pacing & Setup

The Raven Boys is a four-book series, and the first book is mostly a rough sketch filling in the look and feel of the small town Virginia landscape, the restlessness of their quest to find a sleeping king, and the complicated character dynamics that'll go on to define the series for legions of fans. The first book is slow. In print, I found it a bit plain at the beginning. But slowed down on audio, I ended up relishing its subtlety and elegance.

The thing about The Raven Boys, beyond its slow build, is that it's Stiefvater's playful series after the success of her previous books. She's not afraid to get weird and to take big swings in depicting the ragtag group of boys, and that introduces a certain texture of realism that feels almost off-brand to the promises of its genre. I think that makes the depth of the characterization even more convincing and visceral.

Building a Vibe

Often times, I feel like paranormal or grounded fantasy—including my own—veers towards heavy-handedness on the diction in order to persuade the reader to channel a certain "vibe." Stiefvater is so established that she doesn't have to tap into that lexicon, which means she can play with a whole lot more rather than keeping herself rooted in a specific, atmospheric box. (I do love everything Stiefvater shares about her craft and process, so I'm deeply convinced in the intentionality of her works within every detail.)

The Raven Boys is cinematic and absorbing, but she doesn't need to use a specific lexicon of words like dark/shadow/sharp/teeth/swallowed/cloaked/etc. This may not make sense to you if you're not immersed in this particular subgenre of what I fondly call "forest" or "dark and stormy books," but you'll pick up on the defaults if you read plenty. So I admire that, and also think her deftness on that front—while preserving the essence of the setting sweeping over you—is difficult to achieve.

Similarly, I think that nimble quality is so important when writing teenage characters. One of the aspects I fought for most when pitching my book to agents or editors was a sense of balance within the light/dark, seriousness/giddiness—because the highs and lows matter so much to the coming-of-age experience. Even when the paranormal conflict is stewing and intense, kids can be ridiculous or goofy or big-dreamers or what-have-you, and that confusion about how it all should feel matters in the texture of a life (which, also, is why I champion genre and literary fiction equally. Committing to one vibe or path is frankly way easier, and duality is harder but also more important! But I'll hop off my soapbox.) In my opinion, it's easy to write 80,000 words that's an aesthetic; it's harder to build out an aesthetic that also includes the contradictory contours of reality, but you can be more persuasive if you get that right.

On the publishing and author side of things, you'll see dozens of YA writers using The Raven Boys as a comp because they're desperate to channel the same "found family" magic, but I've only read one or two "like TRC" titles that actually deserves the label.

“He couldn’t stand it, all of this inside him. In the end, he was nobody to Adam, he was nobody to Ronan. Adam spit his words back at him and Ronan squandered however many second chances he gave him. Gansey was just a guy with a lot of stuff and a hole inside him that chewed away more of his heart every year. They were always walking away from him. But he never seemed able to walk away from them.”

Because of Stiefvater's experimentation, I think some of the books can feel abrupt and jolting in how they introduce certain plot points. I didn't love the last book (the ending felt like she had no idea how to write them out of a corner, a total mess, and I also will never forget the ridiculousness of Robo-Bee) or even the last line of The Raven Boys (Ronan randomly introducing his dreaming feels so out-of-place to me), but the book as a whole is genius in so many ways that I can excuse the bits that bother me.

But overall, The Raven Cycle is one of those series that proves that if you let an established writer take some risks, people will read it generously, go to bat for it, and then the story might swell to have a cult-favorite following (like this one does.) That's an aspect of publishing that's whittling down in the pursuit of sure bets, so The Raven Boys feels like a breath of fresh air in that sense.

The series is many things at once, but it's not replicable, and distinctiveness is probably my Holy Grail when it comes to books I consider favorites.

Voice & Style & Prose

I love The Raven Boys most for its prose. I think Maggie Stiefvater is one of the best writers on a line level today; she's clever, structural, evocative, and often trots out turns of phrase, parallels, and motifs that are nothing short of brilliant. Her style is atmospheric and stunning, capturing my personal favorite moodiness as well. More recently—long after reading this series for the first time—I encountered Fredrik Backman's Beartown series, and the scaled way they construct their sentences (with counterweights) is similar.

“When Gansey was polite, it made him powerful. When Adam was polite, he was giving power away.”

The characters are both gut-instinct first impressions that feel fully fleshed-out and slowly-building complex people; she nails a proportion of showing vs. telling, said vs. unsaid, that I think you only get to when you're one of the greats.

“Ronan didn't need physics. He could intimidate even a piece of plywood into doing what he wanted.”

Balancing proportion within a narrative is so much about rhythm—either learned or innate—that only steeps after years of reading and writing. She excels in individual moments, and those particular scraps are enough for me to be passionate about a book regardless of what the overall portrait is (but I do love the series zoomed-out, too.)

The Audiobook, Specifically

I live and die for Will Patton's voice. His drawl fits the rural Virginia story perfectly—capturing the sense of place that so keenly defines the book. (You actually might recognize him from his role as the assistant coach in Smith family movie staple, Remember the Titans.)

A few years ago, I got to chat with Maggie at a book conference in New York, and she'd mentioned how much they'd fought for him to do the series. He absolutely makes it as a narrator.

The tricky part of my audiobook taste is that I prefer them to be distinctive and risky and engaging, but it's roughly 50:50 about whether those exact non-monotone books fit my taste or whether they're a complete miss. The Raven Boys is my golden standard in this sense. It's bold and voicey, but pays off in a way that complements and intensifies the appeal of the book itself. While I enjoy the series now enough to go back to the print versions, the audio facet is now entirely embedded in the experience of the story that I can't.

Overall Thoughts

I really do love The Raven Boys, and it's a defining book in YA that also deeply fits in with many portions of my taste. Mostly for the writing and atmosphere, but I love that Maggie Stiefvater can make you believe the dynamic between the boys, the psychics, and all the assorted characters. It narrows in on the speculative elements at times, can be startlingly funny, and overall, I just love specific lines that appear within the narrative that make me wish I'd written them myself.

It's not a book for everyone, but it's convinced enough people (teens, especially) to become readers that it's worth a shot; you'll either completely buy into it or decide it's not for you—so it would be an excellent book to library or sample to try a few chapters before deciding if you're all-in. If you are: congratulations. Get ready for four books of stunning prose, fascinating characters, and a love letter to small town Virginia.

And you should try the audiobook.

For fans of:

The Bad Ones by Melissa Albert; The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern; Beartown by Fredrik Backman (for voice); A Study in Charlotte by Brittany Cavallaro (also for voice); Dark and Shallow Lies by Ginny Myers Sain.