YA BOOK PICK: Blue Lily, Lily Blue by Maggie Stiefvater

Once a month, we choose an outstanding YA book to review. We want to spotlight books of interest to aspiring writers, as well as highlight some of our favorite books and authors!

This month's book pick is Blue Lily, Lily Blue by Maggie Stiefvater, though this is really an ode to the entire Raven Cycle series.

Blue Lily, Lily Blue is the third book in what (I think) will be a four book series called the Raven Cycle, which started with The Raven Boys followed by The Dream Thieves.

Synopsis (from Goodreads):  There is danger in dreaming. But there is even more danger in waking up.

Blue Sargent has found things. For the first time in her life, she has friends she can trust, a group to which she can belong. The Raven Boys have taken her in as one of their own. Their problems have become hers, and her problems have become theirs.

The trick with found things though, is how easily they can be lost.

Friends can betray.
Mothers can disappear.
Visions can mislead.
Certainties can unravel.

Highlights:  It's hard for me not to get all fan-girly when I talk about Maggie Stiefvater's writing. She is, without a doubt, one of my all time favorites, and the Raven Cycle series highlights the many reasons why.

In The Raven Boys, Stiefvater does a flawless job of setting the stage and the world for the books to come.  The story is set in Henrietta, Virginia, where Blue Sargent lives with her psychic mother and their associates. The Raven Boys is the nickname for the boys attending the wealthy and prestigious Aglionby Academy, and Blue has spent all of her youth avoiding them. That is, until she meets Gansey, Adam and Ronan.

Stiefvater is the perfect example of a confident writer. She expertly places readers into the southern town of Henrietta, never explicitly telling readers about the undercurrent of magic, the ley lines or Gansey's quest to find and wake the king that may be buried somewhere in the Henreitta hills. She shows us these things little by little, letting the world unravel for readers one page at a time, until you're completely immersed and accepting of the magical elements in the story. While concepts like psychics and magic are commonly used in YA, this story feels completely unique, and the elements of magic are used in ways I haven't experienced in other paranormal/magical realism books before.

Stiefvater is also an expert at character development. Every character in the book is layered and distinct, with clear motivations and unique voices.  Which is no easy feat given the number of characters she introduces us to.

With series, so often I find that the second and third books never quite live up to the expectations set by the first. Not so with The Raven Cycle series. Blue Lily, Lily Blue was as good, if not better, than The Dream Thieves which was better than The Raven Boys, which on its own was a phenomenal read. And each story, while building on the central plotline developed in the first book, has it's own distinct sub-plot, which I found to be a refreshing approach and made each book independently enjoyable.

My only criticism is that I still have to wait a year to find out how the series will end.

Notes for writers:  Pay attention to the way Stiefvater introduces us to the magical elements of the story. There's a lot to be learned from her effortless way of world building via showing.

A good read for: Fans of paranormal and magical realism looking for something new and different.  Writers looking to get a better grasp of world building, showing vs. telling, and confident writing.

Have I mentioned how much I love this series?  And while I'm gushing about Maggie Stiefvater, let me also recommend The Scorpio Races, The Wolves of Mercy Falls, Sinner, and pretty much anything else she has ever written.

Happy reading!

YA Book Pick: The Raven Boys

On the second Monday of every month, we choose an outstanding YA book to review. We want to spotlight books of interest to aspiring writers, as well as highlight some of our favorite books and authors!

Synopsis (from Goodreads): 

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

First Line: “It was freezing in the churchyard, even before the dead arrived.”

While the passive voice has been (has been=passive) frowned upon by many writers since Strunk & White’s attack on it in Elements of Style nearly a hundred years ago, many writers make passive sing as Stiefvater does in her opening line.

The power and danger of the passive voice is that it is passive, and renders its nouns passive as well. Here, the passive “was” removes the power from the churchyard; she then juxtaposes an active “arrived” immediately following the passive churchyard empowering those who are arriving: the dead. That move immediately sets the tone that those in power here are the dead. So subtle. So well done.

The verb unpower play here reminds me of my all-time favorite use of the passive voice: James Joyce’s Dubliners. Joyce de-activates his verbs as a political warning to his fellow Dubliners that they are losing voice and power to the Brits. His culminating story in the work haunts like Stiefvater’s opening line as it is aptly entitled “The Dead.” Both also use a haunting cold to prime the reader for fear, which I like.

Highlights: 

I was delighted by her plot twists. I was surprised multiple times, and each time it felt as though I should have seen it coming, a tough thing to pull off. Having grown up with all brothers in a neighborhood of boys, I also liked being surrounded by a pack of well-drawn guys, each fitting a different archetype: a trope perfected by One Direction, BIg Time Rush, The Jonas Brothers, Backstreet Boys, In Sync, NKOTB, and the like, but done far less cheesily here.

Notes for Writers: 

Signing at ALA

Stiefvater wrote a spine shivery fun book, but she also was able to weave in some timely and interesting thematic elements really naturally. A lot of the dystopian novels have been playing with the big questions of our day by taking them to their worst natural conclusion as is the job of dystopia; here Stiefvater also tackles a big question, but through character development.

Much of the tension in the pack of boys here is derived from an economic gap. Readers may wrestle with issues of the 1 percent-ers and the 99 percent-ers through the subtle and overt friendship struggle between best friends on either side. Interesting that the book will be released a few months before a presidential election that may be won or lost on how candidates treat the economy.

A Good Read For: Fans of Maggie Stiefvater (obviously), but also anyone who likes a good ghost story, is into astrology, or who grew up on Harry Potter and now wants to spend time with a bunch of rich boys and the quirky daughter of psychics helicoptering through forests in search of power.  

The Raven Boys will hit the shelves September 2012

She signed both for me. So nice!