The Raven King

review by SuddenButInevitable

by Maggie Stiefvater

In which I have a heart attack every page and yell at fictional characters.

Age: Young Adult
Series: Book 4 of the Raven Cycle
Contains: Death, grossness.  Ronan’s mouth.  I can’t remember anything else

Parrish wants to know if you killed yourself dreaming just now please advise

Also check out my reviews of books one and two in the cycle!

All you lovelies!  I meant to write this AGES ago and then… things…. and stuff.  I’ve been escaping into books without writing my reviews because I’m so full of the book and all I want to do is gush, so I get to reading another book to let that feeling subside, but then I’m gushing about that book instead and I forget.

And I literally just spent an hour trying to get the absolutely positively totally there WiFi in the household to connect with the computer.  (It’s right there, computer, I can see the router from where I’m sitting! Go introduce yourself.  Please! Come on! *headdesk*)

Super frustrating.

So, this review is shorter because I’m farther away from the book and don’t feel the need to explain absolutely everything like I normally do.  Tell me which review you like better.  I’ll try and do them that way from now on.

Firstly, let me tell you where I was when I found out that this book had come out.  I was almost sure that I’d preordered it on Amazon (I had not), and then at a Wedding Reception for a friend of mine someone mentioned it, and I’d already said my congrats to the Bride and Groom, so I may actually have been standing in the church gymnasium leeching the WiFi to download this book to my phone.  (Sometimes ebooks are amazing things….) and then started to read.  Because I’m bad at social gatherings. Whee!

No, I left the reception before I really got into the book.  I spent most of this book having a heart attack on every page because (and no spoiler alert, because you were told from page 1 of this series) I thought Gansey would be dying on this exact page. And that page was EVERY page.  And then I would yell at him to quit putting on the school sweater.  I swear, this book took a couple of years off my life.  And yes.  Gansey died.  Because the author told us he would.  But

*SPOILER ALERT*

…he was also brought back to life.  Because this is American literature and we almost always can’t stay dead.

Noah was again, fairly non-existant. And being a ghost, I guess he gets a pass. So instead, we get another character that is all the sudden super important to the story.  (Not great writing as far as I’m concerned)  And there was a fairly fantastic scene with him and facing our fears and phobias.  We may or may not get to know this kid’s name because my internet still hates me an hour and a half and I can’t deal with this right now.  We’ll call him Kevin Tran (Advanced Placement!) (oh Supernatural jokes from SEASONS ago, you are still funny) for now because he is the token Asian kid in the story.

My favorite by far was the transformation of Adam.  If you’ve read the other books in the series, you know that Adam became the eyes and hands of Cabeswater, the weirdo forest where the trees speak (apparently) grammatically incorrect Latin.  I don’t know.  I misspent my language credit in college on Spanish and that hasn’t done me any better than knowing the French that I really wanted to take. (Lesson learned.)  Anyhow, things start going wrong with Cabeswater and thus things start going wrong with Adam and it’s a fascinating transition.  The other quote that really stood out to me was this from Adam as he’s trying to fit in with Gansey’s crowd:

But he could never work out the practicum.  Warm greetings iced in his mouth.  Casual gestures became dismissive.  A steady eye contact turned into an un-nerving stare.

I seriously loved that whole section where he’s just like, how do I do this?  Because I have felt the exact same way.  How can it be so easy when someone else does this social thing and when I do it it feels so false?

It was fantastic to see that put in writing and I love Maggie Stiefvater just a little bit more.

So, the book concludes, and I enjoyed the twist ending.  I would give it away but I think I shall not because it’s a good bit of writing and again, I’m far enough away from my fangirl gushing for this to be able to happen.

Those are my big take-aways from this book.  I liked it a lot.  It’s not a favorite, but it was a really solid read.  I think that know that all 4 books are out, it would be a great read for someone to binge on.  As I’ve stated in previous reviews, it felt a little like she had a big story that was too big for one book, and so someone made her split it up.  Or it could just be I read too many books and then lose details.

So how was this review, guys?  Better than my gushing and giving away too much information?  Tell me what you think!

-SuddenButInevitable