Review - The Dream Thieves

The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle #2)
by Maggie Stiefvater
Date: 2013
Publisher: Scholastic
Reading level: YA
Book type: prose novel
Pages: 360
Format: e-book
Source: library

Now that the ley lines around Cabeswater have been woken, nothing for Ronan, Gansey, Blue, and Adam will be the same. Ronan, for one, is falling more and more deeply into his dreams, and his dreams are intruding more and more into waking life. Meanwhile, some very sinister people are looking for some of the same pieces of the Cabeswater puzzle that Gansey is after...

(synopsis from Goodreads)

This is the second installment in The Raven Cycle.  After finishing the first book, I sort of wanted to keep reading.  After finishing the second book, I sort of don't.  Can someone just let me know if Gansey bites the dust in the end?  (I jest, of course.  I hate spoilers as much as the next reader!)

Reading this book was a weird experience.  It was almost like the opposite of déjà vu.  I couldn't remember half of what went on in The Raven Boys, so continued references to events from that book just had me confused.  In addition to that, there were references within The Dream Thieves to events that had previously occurred in that very book... and it was like I hadn't read them at all.  I'm not sure if it's because of the style of writing in the book; it's technically sound and quite pretty, but it's also rather detached because it's multiple third-person limited-omnicient... so we bounce around between most of the characters and nearly get literary whiplash.  I almost wish that Stiefvater had limited herself to one character point of view per book... but then, I'm not sure she could have told this particular story, since it's so complex.

It also seemed like I was reading about entirely different characters than those in the first book.  I don't remember Blue being so annoying in The Raven Boys, or Gansey so childish, or Adam so mean.  Ronan was different, too, though in a better way (since I really disliked him in the first book and now I only sort of dislike him).

Overall, the impression I got from reading this book was that it was an exercise in character building.  The story is complex, but the pacing is slow for much of the book, which makes it seem like there isn't much of a plot.  Like The Raven Boys, the story is pretty heavily weighted toward the back end; in fact, I almost gave up numerous times throughout the first quarter of the book.  But I kept going and stuff started happening and then the action stopped just as we're hit with a shocking revelation that will be relevant in the next book.  I think I'm seeing a pattern here...

I was not terribly impressed with The Dream Thieves as far as the story went.  It seemed like a lot of stuff happened, complete with convenient contrivances and mentions of so many characters I could never keep them all straight (who the heck is Jimi?).  However, Maggie Stiefvater is a decent writer and when I'm reading one of her books I can usually let the snarky little editor in my head put down her red pen and take a nap.  Sometimes things do get a little overly wordy, but at least there's no incorrect grammar to make me want to tear the book into tiny little shreds.

Despite what I said before, I might keep reading this series... if I can manage to remember what happened in The Dream Thieves by the time Blue Lily, Lily Blue is released.  The books aren't particularly bad, especially if you don't mind a leisurely pace and a story that takes many installments to tell.  At the moment, though, I'm craving something that has a beginning, a middle, and an end that doesn't require thousands of pages and years of waiting to get through!

Plot: 2/5
Characters: 3/5
Pace: 2/5
Writing: 4/5
Editing: 5/5
Originality: 3/5
Enjoyment: 2/5

Overall: 3 out of 5

Review - The Raven Boys

The Raven Boys (The Raven Cycle #1)
by Maggie Stiefvater
Date: 2012
Publisher: Scholastic
Reading level: YA
Book type: prose novel
Pages: 416
Format: e-book
Source: Amazon

"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.

From Maggie Stiefvater, the bestselling and acclaimed author of the Shiver trilogy and The Scorpio Races, comes a spellbinding new series where the inevitability of death and the nature of love lead us to a place we’ve never been before.

(synopsis from Goodreads)

I am completely exhausted after reading this book.  When you go into a novel and find out fairly quickly that one of the main characters is doomed by a prophecy, it's difficult not to read every scene after that with a certain sense of trepidation.  I anticipated that I would, at some point, be on my knees with the book held aloft, shouting, "Why, Stiefvater?  Why?!"  Okay, not really.  But I felt like that might be a distinct possibility... until the point where I glanced at my Kindle app's progress bar and saw that it was at 99%.  This was a great 416-page lead-in for a sequel, I'll give the author that.

That's not to say that I didn't enjoy myself before the story abruptly, unsatisfyingly ended.  The plot and the promise of the plot were interesting and unique.  But what I really enjoyed were the characters, particularly the boys.  The novel switches points of view from chapter to chapter.  We get to see through the eyes of Blue, Gansey, Adam, and Whelk (the boys' Latin teacher), and through them, we also get to know Ronan and Noah and the psychic women in Blue's life.  Unfortunately, I found just about every character more interesting and well developed than Blue.  I'm not sure if that was intentional or not; in the story, she acts as an amplifier for the psychic women's gifts.  For me, she seemed that way in the narrative as well, only serving as a sounding board or a piece of scenery that doesn't do much except support everything around it.  If Blue's point of view had been the only one we'd seen, it would have been very disappointing.  Luckily, we got to experience parts of the story through other eyes as well.  My favourite character was probably Gansey, who was nothing like I expected.  While it could be argued that Ronan and Adam were a bit stereotypical in their roles (alcohol-loving Irish scrapper and downtrodden abused kid, respectively), Gansey was something else altogether.  I appreciated the fact that he was different, and that he tried so hard to find something to believe in.

The only other book I've read by this author was Shiver, so I knew I could count on some fairly solid writing here.  I wasn't disappointed until near the end, when a bunch of what I assume were typos started to creep in (though one never knows if it's just something unique to the Kindle edition).  I was, however, quite confounded by the very last sentence of the book.  It made no sense to me, and I'm not sure if it was supposed to be some really obscure reference to something that's going to happen in the second book, or if my copy is plagued by a syntax-impaired typographical error.

As much as I enjoyed the journey, breathless as I was for most of it, I'm kind of hesitant to read the next book in the series for fear that I'll run into more of the same problems that plagued this story.  I didn't find that much got resolved in the way of the plot.  So many loose ends were left hanging and the foreshadowing went kaput, so that it almost doesn't feel like I finished a book at all; it feels like I merely finished a chapter.

Plot: 4/5
Characters: 4/5
Pace: 3/5
Writing: 4/5
Editing: 3/5
Originality: 5/5
Enjoyment: 3/5

Overall: 3.71 out of 5