I’m extremely tickled by this first pairing (it is actually my second pairing, but I didn’t write about Birnam Wood and The Survivalists fast enough after finishing them, and now they are fading from my mind because I am one entire stupid little goldfishy), of two books where people can pull real things out of dreams. Greywaren is the final book in Maggie Stiefvater’s Dreamers trilogy, which follows the adventures of the Lynch brothers from the Raven Boys quartet (which I loved), most notably Ronan Lynch, who can dream of specific things and then bring them back to the real world when he awakens. It all has something to do with ley lines and something to do with other worlds and something to do with the fact that his boyfriend has gone off to Harvard and left him behind. Jessica Johns’s Bad Cree tells the story of a Cree woman called Mackenzie who has begun to have unsettlingly vivid dreams of her dead sister Sabrina. And when she wakes up, she has brought pieces of the dream back with her.

Jessica Johns (Sucker Creek First Nation) wrote Bad Cree in part because a white male writing instructor had told the class never to write about their dreams, and Johns resolved to “write a story about dreams that validate them in all their beauty and wonder and knowledge” (source). This is an A+ origin story, number one. B of all, it would be hard to deny the power of Johns’s chosen opening image: Mackenzie wakes up from her dream with a severed crow’s head in her hand. It came back with her to the waking world from a horribly vivid dream about finding her sister’s body with a gaping, bloody hole where Sabrina’s heart should be. Terrified by the sudden intrusion of her dreams into the waking world — and the fact that she is being followed by crows for some reason? — Mackenzie makes the difficult decision to travel back home to be with her family, who have their own stories to tell about dreams and the so-called real world.

As the name of the Raven Boys series implies, corvids have always been a staple of the two book series that culminate in Greywaren. One of the first ways Ronan revealed his dream power to his friends was by introducing them to a dream raven called Chainsaw (great name for a corvid), and we continue to catch glimpses of Chainsaw, and other characters beloved from the Raven Cycle series, throughout the Dreamers trilogy. Greywaren concludes the latter trilogy, bringing the Lynch brothers and the many, mannnnnyyyyy other characters back together to save the world from a prophesied world-ending fire. It’s maybe the least bringing-things-back-from-dreams-y book in this entire seven-book series, in part because the prior book shut down the power for dreamers to do that, and in part because Ronan Lynch is spiritually trapped in a sort of liminal dream/otherworld space.

The trouble I’ve had with the Dreamers trilogy overall is that it contains too many characters who stray too far afield of each other. If you came here from the Raven Cycle (which the trilogy pretty heavily assumes that you did), you’ll miss those characters; whether you did or didn’t, you’ll probably spend a certain amount of time sulking about the ratio of how much we’re asking to care about Ronan’s relationship with Adam to how much screen time that relationship actually gets in the course of the series. Maggie Stiefvater remains superb at writing spiky, specific characters, but there were so many of them in this series having so many different adventures that the best I can say is that by the end of book 3 I felt genuinely fond of some of them. The moments when the series sparked to life were those when the characters were in each other’s lives and in each other’s faces, making messes up close instead of in far-flung locations up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

(I don’t really have a very strong grasp on what is comprehended in the term “Eastern Seaboard,” nor have I ever not once had a strong grasp on the geography of any fictional book or real-world place, ever. If I have made a mistake here, I apologize, but please know that mistakes of this type are inevitable for me.)

The core beauty of Bad Cree, a book I will heretofore be advertising to people as an indigenous readalike to Practical Magic the movie (I’ve never read the book), is that Jessica Johns fully understands the necessity of getting all her characters in the same room. When Mackenzie starts having her unsettling dreams, she immediately brings it to her friend and cousin Jory, and they advise her to repair to her family home posthaste to work through the problem with the support of her aunts, her cousin, and her surviving sister. Mackenzie soon realizes that she’s not the only family member whose dreams are imbued with particular power and foreknowledge, a fact that each of her relatives has held close throughout her life, only revealing it now that Mackenzie has opened the door to that sharing. As a family, they’re able to approach the problem of Mackenzie’s haunted dreams, and start finding ways to solve it; things chiefly go wrong when they fail to trust or confide in one another.

Some of the cousins and aunts don’t quite spring to vivid life in the same way as the central three sisters (our protagonist, her late sister Sabrina, and Sabrina’s twin, Tracey), but what’s flawless in every detail is Johns’s evocation of Mackenzie’s home and family. Bad Cree is packed with these gorgeous sensory details — the sound a can of coins makes when you shake it; the way an old couch tips everyone sitting on it toward the center; the lingering smell of cigarette smoke in a bar that hasn’t allowed smoking for years — that flawlessly evoke both the safety Mackenzie felt with her family growing up, and the ways in which her family’s lives have been informed by trauma and historical disenfranchisement.

Perhaps to nobody’s surprise, the evil that haunts Mackenzie has its roots in that very disenfranchisement. That Mackenzie can only fight it by drawing on the power and wisdom of her community might have felt overly allegorical in the hands of a less talented writer. Here it just feels inevitable. Johns writes about Mackenzie’s Cree family with such obvious love and respect, but she doesn’t avoid the painful colonial legacies that have threaded trauma, addiction, and premature death through the fabric of the community. Defeating the present evil is necessary, and satisfying, but it cannot go back in time to restore Sabrina to them, or heal any of the other ills their nation has suffered through the years.

Maggie Stiefvater has an equally obvious love for her characters, but not to quite such good effect. The first two books in the series sprung most vividly to life in scenes between characters I had an existing stake in (i.e., the ones who carried over from the prior series). The same is broadly true in Greywaren, although I was beginning to care about new characters enough to be invested in different sets of them being shuffled around and into each other’s lives. It’s just… this is the third book in the series! It is too late for me to begin to find it interesting for Ronan to see how Declan is with Jordan. As in Bad Cree, the evil in Greywaren can only be defeated through everyone’s combined efforts. They also have to choose to be the best version of themselves, the most capable, the most expansive, the most idealistic. It’s a lovely conclusion that would have landed with much more oomph if most of the characters hadn’t been separated from each other for most of the series. We cannot all be Tolkien!! Nobody likes that half of The Two Towers anyway!!!³

The conclusions I have drawn from this book pairing are below:

• Corvids are dream creatures.
• Together we stand, divided we fall.
• Read Bad Cree! It’s excellent and weird and creepy, and I can’t wait to read more by this author!
• Read the Raven Cycle! It is excellenter than this sequel series.

Coda: If crows were suddenly following you around, what would you do about it? I would bring them presents so that they’d want to be my friends. I have always wanted a crow friend. I would go to some lengths to avoid having a crow enemy.

The post Book Pairing: Bad Cree and Greywaren appeared first on Reading the End.

There was no reason for me to do this. I just felt like attaining an arbitrary goal that made me feel clever. Do I still have more than 30 books checked out from the library? Yes. Do I have multiple ARCs that I’m supposed to be reading and reviewing and they’ve piled up and I’m starting to worry I’ll never catch up? Yes. But January Jenny read one book per day this entire month. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOALS. So here comes a lightning round of all the books I read in January.

There are thirty-one of them.

I’m a goals genius.

Week One

Noor, Nnedi Okorafor – A heavily augmented woman called AO is attacked in the marketplace, after which — she is extremely strong due to all the augmentations — she goes on the run across Nigeria with a Fulani herdsman she meets. A whole world of surveillance follows.

Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, Tamsyn Muir – What a weirdo Tamsyn Muir is. I say it with love! Princess Floralinda is the story of a princess imprisoned in, yep, a forty-flight tower. On every flight there is a different monster, and at the bottom there is a dragon, and none of the princes make it very far. With the help of a horrible little fairy, Floralinda slowly begins to make her way downward. But as she’s changing the state of things in the tower, she changes the state of things in herself as well.

Where the Children Take Us, Zain Asher – This was a Booklist read! It’s Chiwetel Ejiofor’s sister’s memoir. Did you know poor Chiwetel Ejiofor was in a horrible accident with his father when he was a kid? He and his dad were on a road trip around Nigeria to help Ejiofor connect with his heritage, and there was a car accident, and the dad died and the son was very badly injured; and anyway, then Zain Asher’s mum raised them all by herself while running a pharmacy in London. The book’s a love letter to Asher’s mother, although I am not personally a huge fan of memoirs.

The Thief on a Winged Horse, Kate Mascarenhas – I got this for Christmas! The author of The Psychology of Time Travel, which I was so in love with, wrote another book that only (curses!) got published in the UK and not in the US. It’s about a dysfunctional family that makes magic dolls, a young dollmaker who comes to town and insists on joining them, and a daughter of the family who wants to learn her family’s dollmaking secrets too, despite family traditions that reserve those secrets only to the men. It’s a slightly chillier book than The Psychology of Time Travel, but fascinating and enjoyable anyway.

Silence Is a Sense, Layla Alammar – A sort of literary Rear Window, from the point of view of a Syrian refugee with post-traumatic mutism. From her window in a council flat, she watches her neighbors and writes essays, anonymously, about refugees and Muslim identity. When her local mosque is the victim of a vicious attack of vandalism, she’s drawn further into the community. The writing in this was gorgeous, although the ending was maybe just a little pat.

Just Last Night, Mhairi McFarlane – My first time out with Mhairi McFarlane! Recommended by my lovely pal Katie, McFarlane’s a Scottish author who writes lovely books about friendship and romance. Just Last Night follows Eve and her group of friends in the aftermath of one of their deaths. As Eve grapples with the loss of Susie, she’s also forced to reckon with her feelings about Ed — which everyone in the group has known about for years. The romance in this one is slightly back-burnered, and I’d more call it women’s fiction, much as I hate the term?, because it’s really more about Eve’s journey of self-acceptance.

The Dating Playbook, Farrah Rochon – I read this out of order! Which is a shame, because the inciting incident of the series sounds delightful: Three different women discover they’re dating the same man. They ditch the man and become the best of friends, and each of the books in the series focuses on the romance of one of them. The Dating Playbook follows Taylor Powell, a personal trainer who gets her big break when NFL player Jamar Dixon hires her to get him in shape to rejoin the league after a major injury. It’s funny and sweet and contains fake dating: everything you want in a romance novel! I can’t wait to read the others in the series!

The Perishing, Natashia Deon – This one’s a literary fantasy novel about a girl who shows up in 1930s Los Angeles with no memory of how she got there or who she was before. She heals with inhuman speed and — later on — realizes that she seems to possess memories from former lives. Lou’s story, which is vivid in its depiction of the time and place, is interspersed with glimpses of a woman called Sarah in the 2100s, who reflects on her past relationships and the generations-long struggle for equality. The novel’s light on speculative elements and is definitely more on the literary fiction side of things, which suits its plotting (uneven), characterization (wonderful), and writing (gorgeous).

Week Two

Assembly, Natasha Brown – A short novel about refusal.

The Days of Afrekete, Asali Solomon – I read and enjoyed Solomon’s first novel, so I thought I’d pick this one up! It was fine though perhaps not quite my thing. It’s a novel that alternates chapters between a rather fraught dinner party (delicious) and the protagonist’s college career and tumultuous relationship with one of her exes. Both bits were interesting, but I’d actually have loved it to be just a dinner party book. Y’all know my feelings on bottle episodes!

Diary of a Provincial Lady, EM Delafield – A very long time ago, all the cool bloggers were reading this. It is perhaps not surprising that it took me like ten years to get to it. I found it tiresome when I started, but then I realized that the trick was to read it as it was written — in brief installments, like a newspaper column. Once I caught wise and started reading it like that, a few entries at a time, I quite enjoyed it. Not to reread, but it was an amusing entertainment of an evening.

Better to Have Gone: Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville, Akash Kapur – Only once ever have I been so intrigued by the book featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review that I’ve read that review in its entirety, the front page bit and the rest of it that you have to skip to, before reading the rest of the book review. This is because I am fascinated by cults. Auroville wasn’t a cult, but it was, at least, cult-adjacent. Kapur and his wife both grew up in Auroville, and his wife’s parents died there under troubling circumstances. Better to Have Gone tells the story of the founding of this intentional community outside of Pondicherry in India and the deaths of the two people who raised his wife. (Whiskey Jenny and I went to Pondicherry when we were in India, but not to Auroville. I did buy a comforter for my bed, though, that was made in Auroville!)

The Road Trip, Beth O’Leary – Remember how I said a minute ago that I love bottle episodes? Beth O’Leary’s The Road Trip is one, and it was great. Addie and her sister and a stranger who’s hitching a ride with them are on their way to their friend’s wedding when she’s in a car crash with her ex-boyfriend Dylan and his horrible posh friend Marcus. They all pile into the car to go to the wedding (it’s a bank holiday weekend, so! no trains!), and everyone is mad at everyone, and I, obviously, loved it. Easily my favorite of Beth O’Leary’s books thus far. Par for the course with her, it deals with some heavy issues, including alcoholism and sexual assault. But also: ROAD TRIP.

Peter Cabot Gets Lost, Cat Sebastian – I mean! As I was already on the road trip theme! It just made good sense to read Cat Sebastian’s latest, Peter Cabot Gets Lost, in which a rich queer Cabot boy goes on a road trip with a (not rich) former classmate he doesn’t have a crush on. As they make their way across America, they’re forced to reassess their initial ideas about each other and also sometimes there is only one bed. Great stuff. Classic. It’s a very very soft book, as Cat Sebastian’s books always are these days, mainly comprising conversations and sex and occasional stops to check out weird Americana. Also, is it a journey to California or a journey to self-acceptance? YOU DECIDE.

Our Wild Farming Life, Lynn Cassells and Sandra Baer – Another memoir for Booklist! This one about farming. My God, farming sounds hard; equally, I bet James Herriot would have liked these two women and their animals. Food for thought.

A Lesson in Vengeance, Victoria Lee – omg so fun. This is the lesbian witch YA dark academia book you’ve been dreaming of. It’s got similar vibes to Hannah Abigail Clarke’s The Scapegracers, except for it’s more focused on academia — our protagonist, Felicity Darrow (they all have names like this), is studying but pretending she’s not studying a bunch of dead witches who once attended her school. She’s also grieving her girlfriend’s death the previous year, a death in which Felicity and witchcraft may or may not have been complicit. Ellis Haley, for her part, wants to write a book about the dead girls, for which she needs to research how to get away with murder. Setting aside the question of whether anything in this book makes sense, it was fucking fun as hell and I will certainly read more by this author.

The Eternal Audience of One, Rémy Ngamije – I loved this! It’s about a Rwandan Namibian guy and his family and his friends. Actually I have a pretty hard time describing what it’s about! But what I will say is that it made me laugh out loud several times, and I am n o t a person who typically laughs out loud at books. Also, love to see Namibia getting its flowers for welcoming refugees from other parts of Africa that were experiencing unrest in the late twentieth century. What a great country.

Week Three

Subtle Blood, KJ Charles – This is the third in a romance series I generally liked but also felt kind of weird about because it’s set in England between the wars, and the Big Bad is a giant international conspiracy of all-knowing people who are highly placed in government and they want to hoard all the wealth. JUST FELT WEIRD. Anyway, Subtle Blood was my favorite in the series because there is the least amount of the giant international conspiracy, and moreover, Kim’s really excellent former fiancee shows back up and I love her.

The Flatshare, Beth O’Leary – Delighted by my success with The Road Trip, I tried the final Beth O’Leary book I hadn’t read yet, so I read The Flatshare. I loved it more than The Switch but less than The Road Trip, and I was very touched by the friendship between Tiffy and Richie.

Mr. Impossible, Maggie Stiefvater – After my absolute adoration of the Raven Cycle, the first book in Maggie Stiefvater’s new Dreamers Trilogy kinda left me cold. Mr. Impossible is just a way way way better book (it contains the following sentence, which I loved: “She was dressed in a cocktail dress that said, Look at me, and also said, Now that you’re looking, did you notice I think you’re stupid? It was a good dress.“), but I still did not feel emotionally connected to it. Everyone is mad at everyone else! The only bits where I felt emotionally connected to the book were when two characters liked each other, so it was pretty much just when Matthew was helping out Jordan and they were bonding. I’ll read the third book though!

A Lot Like Adios, Alexis Daria – I maybe loved this a scootch less than Daria’s prior book, mainly because the previous one was about a telenovela and that’s my jam. This one was still really fun though. It’s also a solid entrant in the “people with jobs” genre, so there was a lot of stuff about the central couple achieving professional satisfaction. I love that shit.

The Fox’s Tower and Other Tales, Yoon Ha Lee – I am not 100% convinced that I’m smart enough for flash fiction. That’s all, that’s the review.

Lore Olympus, vol 1, Rachel Smythe – Maybe Lore Olympus was too hyped up for me to love it and/or maybe I needed to have read further into it. As I was reading it, I kinda had no idea why the characters were Greek gods at all? Readers please weigh in: Should I press on? Does it take a little while to form a true emotional connection to this book and these characters?

Once More Upon a Time, Rokshani Chokshi – I really should have paired this with Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, as they are both novella-length twists on fairy tales. This is about a couple who were once in love, but because of magical shenanigans, they no longer are. In order to get the life they want, as non-married not-in-love people, they have to go on a road trip to do a favor for a witch. You’ll never guess what happens over the course of the road trip! Never ever once will you ever guess!

Week Four

School Days, Patrick Chamoiseau, trans. Linda Coverdale – Look at meeeee I picked up a book while browsingggggg at the libraryyyyyy! I do this all the time, but usually only from the new book shelves. Doing it from the old book shelves felt very smart of me. I have been meaning to read something by Patrick Chamoiseau for ages, and this story about a young boy attending an extremely colonial Martinique school that does all sorts of colonial things. It evoked a really vivid sense of place, despite being overall way too slow-paced for me.

Don’t You Forget about Me, Mhairi McFarlane – Another repeat author in January! I liked this one more than Just Last Night, because the romance was more central, plus there was a pub. It weirdly also had a lot of similarities to The Road Trip. Reading synergy? It’s about a woman leaving an emotionally abusive relationship, and she gets a job in a pub that turns out to be owned by her first love. Great stuff. Plus there is a dog.

Radha and Jai’s Recipe for Romance, Nisha Sharma – I love this type of YA romance, but this specific one didn’t work for me. The central characters were constantly blowing up at, lying to, or misunderstanding each other, so it didn’t feel like a satisfying or coherent relationship arc. I loved all the stuff about cooking and dance though!

Deaf Utopia: A Memoir — and a Love Letter to a Way of Life, Nyle DiMarco with Robert Siebert – Why am I suddenly reading so many memoirs for Booklist? I was not familiar with Nyle DiMarco, but reading the book caused me to get to watch a bunch of quite cool performances on Dancing with the Stars. Also I love that he represented ASL conversations with the structure and syntax of ASL. I haven’t seen that before!

Future Feeling, Joss Lake – For such an allegorical story (I don’t like allegories) with at least two daddy-kink-heavy sex scenes (I am from the South, where adults call their fathers Daddy, so therefore I cannot with it as a sexual thing), Future Feeling was unexpectedly enjoyable for me. It was funny and heartfelt, and also I loved the escapist fantasy of a global network of trans minders looking out for all trans people.

L.A. Weather, Maria Amparo Escandon – I am actually not sure why this has been getting such a huge marketing push! It’s enjoyable, but I expected there to be more there there, somehow. One thing I did love was the representation of Jewish/Catholic syncretism within this Mexican American family. Apart from that, it’s a perfectly fine family novel! It’s everywhere because publicity decisions were made that it should be everywhere!

The Annual Migration of Clouds, Premee Mohamed – OH how skin-crawly this book made me, in a good way! It’s set in a post-everything-disaster world, and its protagonist, Reid, gets an acceptance letter from a university, her ticket out of the life that keeps her and her family and everyone she knows working flat out to just barely get by. Her mother doesn’t believe the university is even real, but Reid is determined to take her chance at a better life. The truly special thing about this book, though, is Mohamed’s depiction of the Cad, an infection that lives under the skin of Reid and her mother and numerous others, and it might be semi-sentient. The Annual Migration of Clouds is about hope and choice in the most fascinating ways, a very very strong book to end the month on.

WHEW that was a lot of books. I feel like that song “88 Lines about 44 Women.” How was your January?

The post The Thirty-One Books of January appeared first on Reading the End.

1. “A Whole New World” – Pick a book that made you see the world differently.

This may not count, because I barely saw the world at all prior to reading these books. However, I’m still choosing the Chronicles of Narnia. My mother read these books to me and my sister starting when I was three, so there’s not much in my life that didn’t get put through the Chronicles of Narnia goggles. I still experience quite the frisson when I see a lamp-post. Esp in the snow.

2. “Cruella De Vil” – Pick your favorite villain.

Gotta be the other mother from Coraline. In case she’s been missing from your nightmares lately, permit me to refresh your memory: SHE HAS BUTTONS FOR EYES.

3. “I Won’t Say I’m in Love – Pick a book you didn’t want to admit you loved.

Honestly, as I get older and older, I am less and less closety about reading non-prestigious things. I’m going to say P. C. Wren’s Beau Geste and its sequels. They are those Edwardian-era adventure novels that are ideologically troubling on, like, a lot of levels? My fave is problematic.

4. “Gaston” – Pick a character that you couldn’t stand.

The thing is that I love Gaston. Instead of picking a character I couldn’t stand, I shall pick a character who I would hate in real life, but because they’re fictional, I get a huge kick out of spending time with them. And I choose Henry Winter from The Secret History. That dude is creepy? Yet so plausible that he’s capable of convincing people to commit legit murder.

5. “Part of Your World” – Pick a book set in a universe you wish you could live in.

OBVIOUSLY HARRY POTTER.

6. “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes” – Describe what the book of your dreams would be like.

Gosh. What would it be like. It would probably have a boarding school. Maybe there would be a dystopian situation? Like a boarding school in a dystopian universe? Plus with lady characters forming bonds and showing up for each other?

7. “Someday My Prince Will Come” – What book character would you marry if you could.

Sherry from Greensleeves. Greensleeves is an amazing book by Eloise Jarvis McGraw that people do not appreciate enough even though it is now available for purchase through your favorite online retailer. Sherry from Greensleeves is curious about everything, reads constantly, and pays attention to other people. Best.

8. “I See the Light” – Pick a book that changed your life.

Oo tough one! Let’s say, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. They at least changed my reading life. Prior to reading Sandman, I was not a comics gal. If you’re not a comics gal, I do not recommend making Sandman your gateway drug. It has kind of a challenging panel structure. However, if you do make it through ten volumes of Sandman, you will come out the other end a legit comics gal. So it was with me.

9. “When You Wish upon a Star” – Pick a book you wish you could reread for the first time.

Jane Eyre. Of course, Jane Eyre. No, it’s not my favorite book of all time, but it’s not not my favorite book of all time, and reading it for the first time was, and would always be, an incredible experience.

10. “I Just Can’t Wait to be King” – Pick a book with some kind of monarchy in it.

How about Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall? I read this last year and was surprised to find that it’s wonderful! Mantel is brilliant at bringing historical figures to life, even ones who are larger than life in the first place like Henry VIII. WHY MUST ANNE BOLEYN DIE IN THE SECOND BOOK WHY OH GOD.

11. “Colors of the Wind” – Pick a book with a beautiful colorful cover.

Maggie Stiefvater’s Blue Lily Lily Blue. All of the books in this series actually! But Blue Lily Lily Blue has to be the most beautifulest one of all!

GLORIOUS. DISNEY SONGS.

The post Disney Song Book Tag appeared first on Reading the End.

The Raven Cycle is about figuring out how to be a person. Or more specifically, how to be a person when your world as it stands is not — is nowhere near — enough. One of our protagonists, Richard Campbell Gansey III,¹ is looking for a Welsh king. Everyone else — Adam Parrish, who’s trying to be someone different; and Ronan Lynch, who’s looking for true things in a world full of liars; and Blue Sargent, the only non-psychic in a house full of psychics, who desperately wants something more — finds “looking for a Welsh king” to be a viable means of also searching for what they do want, so they are along for the ride. Mostly what they are all looking for is How To Be.

(how to be free, how to be happy, how to be a friend, how to make your life matter)

That they are sometimes phenomenally bad at these things makes it all the more satisfying as, over the course of the series, they get better and better at being who they want to become. Compare, for instance, the chats about relationships Adam and Blue have in The Dream Thieves versus in The Raven King. Compare the way Gansey is with Blue the first time they meet to the way he is with her — well, any time else, really, I just wanted to remind you of that whole President Cell Phone snafu because it remains one of my favorite scenes in the series. The lovely thing is that Adam and Blue and Gansey are fully themselves in all the versions of all these conversations; they are just getting better at it as they go along, in a lovely organic way.

It’s funny that I started with a spoiler warning, because in fact one of my favorite things about these books is how unspoilable they are. Or conversely how eminently disappointing it would be to go into them spoiled. Maggie Stiefvater’s maybe-best trick as a writer is that she always tells you the spoilers herself, probably more than once, but when the big reveal arrives, you’re still surprised, because she told you what was going on, but you were too distracted by something else she was doing at the same time.

(It makes rereading fun! You reread and you’re like “Oh she told me this exact information in Chapter 4.” “Oh, Ronan has been saying this all along and nobody was paying any attention.”)

Also, there’s magic and creepy trees. If magic and creepy trees are things that interest you. Or Latin. Or Tarot cards.

ONWARD TO THE SPOILERS.

Are you ready now? For spoilers?

Okay. Here they come. In no particular order.

NUMBER ONE. I cannot, and it is unfair for you to expect me to, handle a situation in an already emotional book in which a character I love walks into a creepy forest to meet his own death. You know perfectly well that gives me Harry Potter flashbacks. I had to put the book down for a minute because I couldn’t face the possibility of Gansey being alone when he died, even though I knew from previous visions that at least Blue was going to be there with him.

NUMBER TWO. I love it that Glendower was dead, and there was no favor, and the search brought them to a dead (ha ha ha) end. Mostly because I’m nihilistic that way, but also because it wasn’t ever really about Glendower in the first place (see above). It was about these people and their friendship and what they were growing into. Even Ronan knows that Gansey could have found Glendower any time he wanted, if he’d wanted to. It actually was the journey, and not the destination, that mattered.

NUMBER THREE. Everything about everything relating to Blue and Gansey, and Adam and Ronan, was perfect in every way. But my favorite thing, probably, was this:

He said, “I thought this was a night for truth.”

“Ronan kissed me,” Adam said immediately. The words had clearly been queued up. He gazed studiously into the front yard. When Gansey didn’t immediately say anything, Adam added, “I also kissed him.”

I don’t know why that amuses me so much. It’s just such an Adam thing to add, while he is talking to Gansey about, basically, how best to be careful of Ronan and what to do about it all.

Relatedly, I love Adam the best. My Myers-Briggs personality type is INTJ, which if you take a gander at a few of those “Which Harry Potter/Star Wars/Marvel Universe character are you?” Myers-Briggs charts, you will find is the personality type of mainly fictional psychopaths and life-ruiners. So it was nice to have such an exceptionally INTJ-y INTJ character like Adam to who was neither a psychopath nor a life-ruiner.²

NUMBER FOUR if I may make one tiny criticism. I am not sure we and the other characters had enough time to deal with their losses. Gansey is dead for like two seconds before they bring him back to life, and even though I find the manner in which he is brought back to life quite satisfying, I would have liked that emotional beat to matter a little more and a little longer. Like maybe if Henry Cheng hadn’t been there for it? And if they’d had to take Gansey home and once they got home he said the thing about them being magicians?

Also, and mainly, nobody got a chance to grieve Noah. I guess it’s fine that they never knew he’s the one who saved Gansey — I actually like it when there’s important pieces of the story that important characters never find out — but I’m sad we didn’t see them recognizing that he was gone gone, and having the chance to grieve. And after he was so sweet to Ronan.

NUMBER FIVE, Adam borrows Ronan’s car to go see his family at the end. (I assume his Hondayota finally bit the dust?) That Adam let Ronan lend him a car, and that Ronan let Adam go do this scary feelings thing on his own, says everything about how much these two characters have changed over the course of the books. What a great series.

You may now feel free to squeal at me in the comments about any and all of the books in this series.

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Oh, I went to the library too. We don’t need to talk about that. I DO NOT HAVE A PROBLEM.

So, what am I reading?

Well, I am plowing my way through my mother’s copy of HAMILTOME, in the hopes that I can finish it before she notices I swiped it. My local bookstore put The Raven King out on the shelves a few days early, which I confess was the outcome I had hoped for, and I purchased it feeling very wicked indeed and expecting at every moment that the booksellers would say HEY THAT BOOK IS NOT OUT YET and take it away from me. I’m trying to make it last because I’m going to be well sad when this series is over. And finally, I’m reading Jowhor Ile’s And After Many Days, which despite my casting it in the position of “vegetables to eat because I cannot eat dessert Raven King all the time,” is quite, quite excellent.

I want to quote like sixteen things from The Raven King, because I love what Maggie Stiefvater is doing with this world and these characters, but I will spare you. I will just say, for now, that there are some triplets in this book who are the light of my life.

It’s Monday, what are you reading?

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All that consoles me in this trying time is the evergreen wellspring¹ of YA fiction, of which there is a plethora this spring season. Here are three that I’m particularly looking forward to, in celebration of Waiting on Wednesday.

Chasing the Stars, Malorie Blackman

Perhaps you read the Noughts and Crosses series when they came out a million years ago, and perhaps since then you have wondered what Malorie Blackman was up to, since she evidently wasn’t writing any more books. You have been played for a fool, I’m sorry to say. Malorie Blackman has been writing books this whole time, and America has not been goddamn publishing them.

Well may you shake your fist at the heavens. America still isn’t publishing Malorie Blackman, but on April 21st, a new book of hers comes out in the UK that is genderswapped Othello in space. I’ll repeat that for the people in the back: GENDERSWAPPED OTHELLO IN SPACE. You may repair to the Book Depository for your copy.

Places No One Knows, Brenna Yovanoff

Admittedly I have been up and down on Brenna Yovanoff, but I feel great about her new book. It’s about an overachieving girl and an underachieving boy and the small bit of magic that brings them together. I have been promising a heaping helping of darkness and emotional honesty, with a splash of fantasy. This one drops in late May, by which time I dearly hope the goddamn caterpillars will all be gone.

THE RAVEN KING THE RAVEN KING THE RAVEN KING

Note: The actual title of the book is The Raven King once. I just said it three times because I’m very, very excited to read it. Will Gansey die? Probably but I don’t believe it’s permanent. Will birds do things birds don’t normally do? Almost certainly.

If you got excited the other day when I said “sociological speculative fiction,” then your luck’s in because I stole that term from Maggie Stiefvater, who used it to describe these very books. Start with The Raven Boys and work your way through the sequels, and then you won’t even have to wait very long to read the fourth one. LUCKY YOU because I have been waiting all this whole year and on April 26th at last my wait will be at an end.

Tell me, friends: What are you looking forward to this season? And also, what, in your opinion, is the worst thing about spring?

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Day 3 What have you read and loved because of a fellow blogger?

What haven’t I read and loved because of a fellow blogger? Before blogging, my reading life was on its way to becoming a tragic wasteland. I had exhausted the recommendations of my friends and relations and was reduced to — this is not a joke — examining college syllabi for various English classes, under the assumption that they would contain recommendations for New Classics.

Since then, all my newly acquired favorite authors have been by way of fellow book bloggers, and I am basically dead from gratitude. Perhaps I would one day have discovered Helen Oyeyemi, because she wins the prizes and is a literary darling (in a minor way); but who can say if ever I would have discovered some of the, for instance, YA authors that I now cherish? Maggie Stiefvater, Kekla Magoon, Patrick Ness? Would I only have discovered them when movie adaptations of their books were made?

Not to mention (but oh, I shall mention it) the curating of comic books done for me by my fellow book bloggers! Where would I have learned which Marvel comics to read? Would Paper Girls be on my TBR list now? (Doubtful.) Would I know about the Tamakis? Princeless? WOULD I?

Stop by the Estella Society to see what else people have been reading because of other book bloggers! And as usual, I love you all. Kisses!

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Second note: Of necessity, I’ll be talking about some of the events of the first two books in this series. If you haven’t read those yet, the short version of this review is that Blue Lily Lily Blue is an excellent third installment in an excellent series. But you probably shouldn’t read on unless you want to be spoiled for the first two. Spoilers for Blue Lily Lily Blue occur only in the bottom, bullet-pointed section, and I’ve marked it that way.

ETA third note: Alice has rightly pointed out that if you haven’t read the first two books in this series, this review makes no damn sense. So you should probably skip it. And go read The Raven Boys and The Dream Thieves. That is probably a better use of your time. My reviews of those two books are here and here.

Maura Sargent has been missing for over a month, and Blue and her raven boys are spelunking in Cabeswater, hunting for Glendower and Maura both. The man who hired someone to retrieve the Greywaren has come to town to do the job himself, and he’s brought backup. Blue does not pay reliable enough attention to whether Gansey is or is not wearing a rain-spattered Aglionby sweater at any given moment, and the answer to everyone’s questions seems to be in a mountain cave, which sings into Adam’s deaf ear and whose owner insists that it’s cursed.

Two processes are befalling the characters in the Raven Cycle. First, they are growing from variously broken teenagers into the working-order versions of themselves they have the capacity to become. Second, they are developing into powerfully magical people you don’t want to fuck with. Stiefvater knits these two things so tightly together that they become component parts of one and the same process: As Blue settles more comfortably into the feeling of belonging to her group, she’s also evolving a better and better sense of the value of her particular gifts and the ways she can usefully deploy them. [Adam example redacted for spoiler reasons]

They’re also discovering what readers knew all along: that they’re stronger together than apart. You see this particularly with Adam and Ronan, the two who have tapped into the fierce, unpredictable power of Cabeswater, and who can do some truly remarkable things when they’re working together. There’s a nice symmetry between Kavinsky’s shitty, amoral tutelage of Ronan in The Dream Thieves and Ronan’s clear-eyed confidence in Adam throughout Blue Lily Lily Blue. Both boys are pushing someone else to be more than what they’re currently being; but where Kavinsky was telling Ronan, Be more like me, Ronan’s telling Adam, Be more like you. It is super lovely.

Blue and Gansey are still in the throes of Doomed Love. Maggie Stiefvater does her best to get to me by having Gansey give Blue his coat and then teach her how to drive stick shift, and look, I am not made of stone, standard transmission cars are amazing and nothing says love like making sure the other person is warm enough, but still, so far I like Blue and Gansey separately more than I like them together. Or rather, I like them together fine when they are joking about faxes from hell, and less when they start getting all Doomed about their Love. It’s not them; it’s the Doomedness of their Love.

In terms of plot advancement, quite a lot of important events occur, and some mysteries are solved while many more are raised (including a pretty big one about Gansey’s past). Whether you came for the characters or the search for a Welsh king, there are so many reasons to leave this book feeling satisfied. Stiefvater’s writing is as lovely as ever, with her weird and perfect metaphors, and it has been an extremely long time since I loved any fictional characters the way I love these ones.

Miscellaneous, spoilery observations (this section will include both plotty and emotional spoilers. Big ones. Look away.)

• Adam and Ronan should always team up to do magic and iniquity together. It is the best.
• Actually, the real, legitimate best is when Gansey says “Wake up.” I got chills.
• Why is everyone in the visions switching places? I don’t like that! At least when it was clearly Gansey who was supposed to die, I knew where to focus my worry. Now it just seems like anyone could choose to sacrifice themselves to save anyone else. Adam sees a version of his Gansey-dying vision where it’s Ronan dying instead; the vision Blue and Gansey share in the vision tree swaps two lines of dialogue when it happens in real life.
• The reveal about Matthew is the Maggie Stiefvaterest reveal ever. She has this brilliant gift for making you not notice that she’s told you a secret several times in a whisper before she tells it out loud. It even feels crazy to call it a spoiler. Of course Ronan dreamed Matthew. It’s been obvious all along, but I just didn’t notice. (Cf. Noah being dead.) (You guys, that is rough for Declan. I feel bad for Declan.)
• My head knew that there was no chance at all that Ronan and Gansey weren’t going to show up to Adam’s court date, but my heart could not bear the suspense. Maybe it is too Hollywood and too facile a resolution of what Adam has been trying to learn about himself all along, but it’s such a good moment that I don’t care. “Behind him was Ronan Lynch, his damn tie knotted right for once and his shirt tucked in.”
• “Why me?” “I hear if you want magic done, you ask a magician.”
• The cliffhanger ending everyone was going on and on about: Piffle. That is not a cliffhanger. They spent the whole book saying Whatever we do we must not wake up that one sleeper, oh man, that would be a terrible catastrophe if that one sleeper got woken up. If you didn’t know that someone was going to wake the sleeper, you must have never read a book before. A cliffhanger is like when the protagonist has just defeated his human foe and then he turns around and there’s a whole alien army bearing down on them all. It is not a cliffhanger if it surprises you zero.

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Coming down from a book hangover after reading The Raven Boys and The Dream Thieves was tricky. As of this writing, I think I am mostly okay; I just need to really figure out what my next read is going to be. Alternating Maggie Stiefvater books with unreviewable academic texts is probably not a sustainable direction for the blog (though very fun for me).

Anyway, part of my hangover recovery process was binge-reading The Lesser Works, i.e., Shiver, Linger, and Forever, which are about a girl who falls in love with a wolf. (Luckily for her mental health, the wolf turns out to be a person.) I wasn’t terribly interested in Sam and Grace, but I quite liked the newly made werewolf who shows up in Linger, a drug-addicted suicidal musician called Cole, and I quite liked Grace’s angry friend Isabel, who got impatient when anybody acted wistful and accomplished many helpful deeds in an extremely angry way. Sinner is about them.

Still a werewolf, but generally able — for reasons that aren’t terribly interesting or important — to hang onto his human form, Cole has come to L.A. after Isabel. He’s also there to record a comeback album and be part of a reality show about recording the album, which he hopes will pay him well enough to save him the financial necessity of going on tour, which he’s leary of doing as an addict and also as a werewolf. Isabel is working in a store that pays her not to give a damn and living with her mother and her meek younger cousin Sofia. She is furious with whoever happens to be around, which for much of this book means Cole, about whom she has very very mixed feelings.

I only knew that my heart was galloping so fast that my fingers were numb. Logically, I knew it was just from surprise [at seeing Cole], but I didn’t know if it was like Surprise, here is a cake or Surprise, you’ve had a stroke.

I love reading about angry women. I love it. See also The Woman Upstairs (this is possibly the only Maggie Stiefvater–Claire Messud comparison you will read today).

Unlike Shiver and Linger and Forever, which go into fairly deep detail about the mechanics of being a werewolf, Sinner is light on the supernatural elements. You could swap out Cole’s changing into a werewolf in his bathroom to doing drugs in his bathroom, and the story would carry on in just about exactly the same way. It’s more of a straight romance, as well as a love letter to Los Angeles. Isabel and Cole are each damaged in their own right, and Cole in particular represents aspects of Isabel that she wants to put behind her (the messy lives of the werewolves, the loss of her brother). They are both people who want to get away from who they have been, and be some better version of themselves, and it’s not at all clear that that’s something they can accomplish together.

Though I wouldn’t put this on nearly the same level as The Raven Boys, Stiefvater’s writing has not stopped being wonderful. She’s clever and funny, and she’s also brilliant at producing simple, evocative descriptions that make her settings and characters pop. Like this:

He generally appeared famous and not true and not really present in any given moment. There was always a dissonance between him and his surroundings, as if he were being smoothly and handsomely projected from a distant location.

And this:

But I knew Isabel, and I knew that every single one of her emotions looked like anger from the outside.

Plus, sexual agency! I appreciated this in Shiver as well — teenagers have sex, and Stiefvater isn’t wringing her hands over it. I’m not sure exactly how to phrase this, but basically: Before I had sex for the first time, I had conceived of it as a much bigger deal than it was in some ways, and a much smaller deal than it was in other ways. I think Stiefvater does well here, and in Shiver, at writing about the ways in which sex is and is not actually a big deal in real life.

If you haven’t read the Raven Cycle books yet, go do that; but if you have and you’re just counting down days on your calendar until Blue Lily, Lily Blue, Sinner is a good book to while the time away. I should have maybe read it more slowly, actually. Now I am right back where I was before. Oh when will it be October?

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After finishing The Raven Boys, I wanted to go out to the bookstore and buy The Dream Thieves in hardback. But since I almost never buy new hardbacks, and some people didn’t like The Dream Thieves as much, I instead put a sensible hold on the ebook copy at my library. The hold came in (blessedly promptly), and I read twenty pages of it, then the end, and then I went to Barnes & Noble and bought it in hardback. So, ten million stars.

Ronan, the mean one of the raven boys, confesses to his friends at the end of The Raven Boys that he took his pet raven, Chainsaw, out of his dreams. The Dream Thieves is about what else Ronan can learn to take from his dreams. A year and a half ago, Ronan found his father’s body; afterward he and his two brothers were given a few million dollars apiece and a command never to return to their home, where their mother has lived in perfect silence since their father’s death. Now a hit man has come to town to find whatever is making dreams survive, and the ley lines in Henrietta have been fluctuating madly since Adam’s sacrifice in Cabeswater.

Ronan ends The Dream Thieves with his emotions in slightly better order than he begins, but the opposite thing happens to poor old doomed Gansey. We are starting to see messier sides of him. There’s something tremendously unsympathetic about him picking a fight with Adam at the rich-people party they attend together and then doing this business:

Gansey glanced over his shoulder, furtive. His mouth made the shh shape, but not the sound.

 

“Oh, what?” Adam demanded. “You’re afraid someone will hear? They’ll know everything isn’t perfect in the land of Dick Gansey? A dose of reality could only help these people!”

That last bit is a very teenager thing for Adam to say, I will grant you. However, this is not a nice move on Gansey’s part! Enormous parties where people’s futures are being decided are not good places to initiate serious conversations about emotionally fraught issues! Especially if you are comparatively more at home at rich-people parties than your interlocutor. And also, once you have initiated the emotional conversation, you can’t then shush the other person. It is too late! If you didn’t want to have the conversation, don’t start the conversation. Good heavens.

In case it’s not clear by this time, I’ll just state for the record that I loved this book as much as I loved the previous one. (Maybe more? Can’t decide.) It’s a huge cliche to say that the characters feel like real people to me, but they do — I keep wanting to gossip about them although they are not real. The redacted treatises were no joke. I had A LOT of things to say. Good to know it’s not just me though:

In closing, that sexy dream Ronan had about Adam undoubtedly launched 1000 slashfics, and that is one of the things about the internet that makes me feel enormously fond of it.

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