Hello fellow book lovers!

Hopefully you all had a wonderfully relaxing Easter break last weekend and you got to spend it with the ones you love and the book/s you love too!

Today I want to give you my take on what has became one of the most popular series in all of YA.

The Raven Boys is a Young Adult magical realism story following Blue Sargent, the daughter of a small town mystic who can see the dead and read the future. Her whole life Blue has been surrounded by people who could do things that didn’t make sense but for some unknown reason she has never been able to do those things herself. That all changes when on an annual visit to her local graveyard on one of the most magical days of the year Blue sees the ghost of a boy she will soon come to know very well, he just so happens to be a raven boy.

With true love curses and trees that can talk this book explores being independent, being wealthy, being different and being young.

There was always so much talk about The Raven Boys in the YA world and I’d heard loads of good things so I decided last week that now was the time to finally pick up this story. It did not disappoint. Aside from being, genuinely very well written one of the biggest things about this book that really jumped out to me was how completely stranded I was within the plot. I mean this in a positive way, of course. Before going into TRB I had a very solid image in my mind about what I thought it was going to be like and instead what I got was something entirely different.

I am a sucker, like many of us, for stories about high school and all of the usual dramas that surround the most momentous time in our lives that we call being a teenager. However, The Raven Boys in a pleasant shock did not build itself up on being a book about being an angsty adolescent with a dark secret and a splash of unrequited love. The boarding school that the Raven Boys go to in the story is an important element but it isn’t shoved in our faces and generally not a lot of time is spent there. The focus of TRB is on the characters and the multitude of events that unfurl around them not the usual cliches of who likes who and will you go to prom with me? I guess what i’m trying to say is that in this book youth is done in a tasteful way.

Not just youth but wealth too. Often in young adult books our protagonists posses some superpower that makes them unique enough for us to care about reading their story. TRB is no different, Gansey has his insatiable curiosity, Blue has her mysticism and Ronan has his money. Stiefvater somehow manages to weave a web of magic and folklore into every day realistic problems that normal people face like family and acceptance. The affluence of the Raven Boys, to me was one of the most intriguing of all of these real life problems. I have always found the young and wealthy to be some of the most interesting characters and Stiefvater paints the effects of wealth, in this book, in a way that feeds that interest profoundly. It can be very easy for normal people like you and me (I apologise if you are a millionaire) to romanticise wealth and picture it as an everlasting comfort blanket of excess. However in TRB, in the most raw and honest way, Stiefvater assures us that its not all rosy in the nicer part of town.

I could of talked about this book all day if I didn’t have an English essay due tomorrow so I’m just going trust that you all are clever enough to go out and buy this masterful piece of literature. The hype around this story exists for a reason- its because its good.

I give this book a 5 out of 5 stars

Keep on reading!

And thanks again Beth