The Raven Boys
Ratings408
Average rating4
MUY bueno. No me recorría esta emoción por el cuerpo desde que lei Cazadores de Sombras en el 2014. Cada uno de los personajes esta creado de una forma majestuosa, todos tienen una razón de ser y una explicación de por que actúan como lo hacen.
La relacion entre ellos es excelente. No podia dejar de leer simplemente por la curiosidad de saber como iban a seguir interactuando.
No solo eso, sino que el libro es re fácil de leer. Los capítulos están escritos 1000/10. No puedo ni describir lo mucho que disfrute leer este libro. No puedo esperar a leer el siguiente.
i'm reading this for the first time as a 27 year old and i thought i'd be too ‘old' for this, especially considering the odd boyband deviantart esque cover on my library copy. but age be damned, i still had my smiling face buried in my hands when blue received her flowers. i enjoyed it! the second half was a lot more exciting than the first, though i wasn't bored in the first half, i liked the setting up of the story even if it was a tad slow.
i accidentally guessed the ‘twist' without realising it. i was musing about how 60% into the book, noah - one of the main four boys had only appeared in the doorway of two scenes looming like a ghost - it never actually occurring to me that he WAS a ghost. i thought that was a nice touch, and i'm glad he came back at the end. i was grinning like an idiot when they all ran out of the church. it would have been sad to lose him. though i'm not sure what adam ended up sacrificing, if he walked out the ritual apparently unharmed. perhaps this will be attended to in further books.
i'm looking forward to seeing what happens in the rest of the books and i've grown fond of the characters. - wtf was that last line about!
I'm writing this review in retrospect. This book was enjoyable enough for me to have committed to reading the entire series. I don't think an entire series was really needed for this story - I personally think just two books would've sufficed.
Blue's character is dangerously close to the manic pixie dream girl trope, so if that's something that irks you keep it in mind before reading.
This isn't a huge commitment as a book, worth reading if you want something simple and entertaining. But don't expect anything groundbreaking.
I enjoyed listening to this book. The characters came to life and were well developed. I can't wait to start the next book to hear more of Blue and the Raven Boys quest. The plot twist had me reeling and caught me off guard.
This book hadn't really been on my radar but I am so glad to have read it.
When I saw that there was a prestigious academy for boys I did a little internal groan because usually that is not my cup of tea. I enjoyed that there was definite ways that class bubbled into their lives with Gansey and Adam being the best examples. It was not just a tale of boys doing things with enormous amounts of disposable income - although that did happen once or twice. My girl Blue also recognized from a young age that she was different but I did not see her fall into the ~not like othER girLS~ trap that sometimes happens.
Look, I already know we have a love triangle coming our way and I've braced for impact on that one. However at some points of this book I was like... is this meant to be queer? Is this how I'm supposed to interpret this exchange?
Can't wait to read the next one!
I just loved the characters so much. By the end of this suspenseful and magical story I felt like I knew them implicitly. Solid writing lends to a very atmospheric tale. On to the second!
I can already tell this series is going to be close to the top of the list of my favorites!
2023 reread: AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH GOD THIS WAS EVEN BETTER THEN THE FIRST TIME I READ IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3.5 estrellas porque me llevo casi 250 páginas engancharme bien en la historia.
En si, la narración y la historia es buena, el problema más grande que tuve fue que las primeras 200 paginas fueron muy pesadas de leerlas.
Podría decir que en libro comenzó a cobrar sentido, para mí, una vez que blue comienza a juntarse con los chicos del cuervo. Pero al fin y al cabo fue una lectura que disfrute bastante, no puedo decir que es de mi favorite tho.
Y ame a los personajes, nada más que decir
Me ha encantado este libro. Tanto la historia como los personajes están rodeados de un misterio que te hace querer seguir leyendo hasta descifrar todos los secretos escondidos.
Algo que me gustó mucho fue que los protagonistas son muy distintos los unos de los otros, tienen más diferencias que similitudes y eso hace que cada uno destaque por algo. Todos tienen algo que aportar a la historia en lugar de que haya ciertos personajes con más relevancia que dejan en un área secundaria a los demás, aunque al comienzo de la sensación de que el libro va a ir por esa vía.
La historia es igual de increíble pero en realidad creo que lo que más destaca no es en si la historia principal si no las historias que hay detrás de cada protagonista, que vamos descubriendo según avanzamos en el libro.
Lo único por lo que no le doy 5 estrellas es por el final. Teniendo en cuenta que lo central de la historia son las líneas ley, no sabemos prácticamente nada de ellas. Spoiler Sí, se cuenta que son energía, que hace falta un sacrificio para activarlas y que tienen un gran poder, pero ¿qué tipo de poder? ¿qué es lo que se puede hacer con él? Espero que en los siguientes libros expliquen esto un poco más a fondo.
I don't give many 1 star ratings, but I really didn't like this, at all. I know a lot of people love this series, that's why I gave it a try. Plus it was available on audio from my library. But it was PAINFULLY slow and boring, and way too dark for my taste. I think I don't like urban fantasy as a general rule. I didn't care for the writing style either. So I do not plan on reading any of the other books in this series.
Also, why does this have 4.06 average rating on Goodreads??? I really don't get it. I would have DNF'ed this one if I could ever bring myself to do that...
The Raven Boys is a low fantasy young adult novel about four private schoolboys in Virginia and Blue, the psychic's daughter. I have heard about this series from probably everyone I know who reads and from half of the booktube community I follow. I decided to pick it up after being recommended it so many times over the years because I felt I needed to know finally if it was exactly as good as everyone said it was or if I'd find another over hyped YA novel.
And as with the trend this year, I immensely enjoyed the book. We begin focusing on Blue, the daughter of the local psychic in Henrietta, as she goes on the annual trip to the local churchyard to record the names of everyone in the town who will die in the next twelve months. The novel goes on to follow her as she meets the Aglionby boys and discovers their search for the Welsh king.
I found the plot of the book to be intriguing, however slow to start. For the first half of the book I didn't know when things would begin to happen. While this wasn't a negative experience as vital the backstory and characterisation was done in this half it did feel slow. In fact, at one point in my status updates I lamented that one of the male characters felt surplus to requirement as he had rarely been involved in the plot so far. This was quickly corrected as the second half of the novel ramped up the pace. The characters are actually where I think the book excels. The book is in the third person perspective, which I prefer, and it spends time in all of the main character's heads but focuses mainly on three. Of these three, Adam and Gansey were my favourite characters. The setting felt equally real, and I have no faults with the book there. My only complaint was that the author regularly used flowery writing to describe various things or feelings throughout the book that made absolutely no sense.
All in all, a pleasant surprise of a book.
How did I miss these books??? They're funny, snarky, sad, suspenseful and above all else I can't wait to read the rest of the series!
I will admit that this took me a while to really get into, but that may be because I was in a funky mood and Google Play Books doesn't always react as quickly as I want.
Anyhow, I love the characters and I am so interested to see where this is going.
Fave character? Adam??? Ronan?? Blue?? I'm torn.
Looking forward to getting my hands on the next one!
just had such a hard time getting into this book. Although this book was good, I expected a lot more from it. I had such high expectations and it fell very flat for me. It was hard to follow a lot of the times and the magic was so imprecise and unexplained it confused me more than intrigued me. I did thoroughly enjoy all the characters though. I'm hoping I like the next one more.
Sooo slooow. Seriously. Just skip to page 274 and save yourself some time.
Also, what a rushed, stupid ending. Could have been a little better if the author wasn't so focused on creating loose ends.
Waste of my time.
I struggled to get through this one for lack of interest BUT I'm glad to have finally read some Maggie Stiefvater, and I'm not normally a fan of YA fantasy.
This one is hard for me to rate. For the first 200 pages or so, it was just a really weird story, with characters that seemed unrealistic and a world that was ours but with enough supernatural elements to make it impossible. A bunch of high school children believing in a buried Welsh king in Virginia and the magical ley lines of energy that would lead to him seemed too far-fetched and it was difficult for me to get into it, though I kept reading because I was determined to finish when so many of my friends had enjoyed the book. After page 200 though, the action finally started picking up and with the revelation of Noah's backstory, I was finally invested and enjoyed finishing the final 100 or so pages. It was a solid 3 stars up until that and then I wavered between 3 and 4. The writing is good enough to keep the reader engaged but, like I said, some of the characterisations of these supposed children are too unrealistic - especially Gansey. I just can't imagine a 17 year old, ridiculously rich or not, being obsessed with medieval legends and asserting himself as a father figure to his friends. I'm looking forward to reading the sequel because it focuses more on Ronan and his family.
I have been doing really well knocking out lots of series I've been planning on reading this year and having now completed all of the Cassandra Clare novels I was looking for an intriguing new series to pick up as we move into the second half of 2017 and I had heard such wonderful things about Maggie Stiefvater's Raven Cycle that it didn't take me long to delve into The Raven Boys.
This book was one I wasn't quite sure how I would get on with, sometimes as I'm an older adult reader of Young Adult fiction I sometimes do find some novels just don't quite grasp me due to the writing style and content but I have to be honest that The Raven Boys was a book I flew through in a few days and did enjoy very much. It's difficult not to be intrigued when the very first thing we learn in the narrative is that one of our lead characters Blue has been told that if and when she kisses her true love he will die.
This revelation leads us to a major discovery about this book which is that the paranormal and psychic worlds will play a large part in this series as Blue has been raised in a house full of psychic women and is indeed about to take part in the St Marks' Day ritual at her local ruined church where she and her mother go annually to see the spirits of those who will die within the next 12 months. Blue herself is unable to see the undead, instead she is an amplifier for the powers of those who can, however on the night of St Marks' she sees the spirit of a young boy named Gansey, a pupil of the local private school Aglionby. Her aunt informs her that if she is able to see him this means one of either two things, either he is her true love or she killed him.
With this revelation under her belt it is then somewhat worrying when Gansey stumbles into her life seeking a psychic reading from her mother in order to help him find the local ley lines which will lead him to the body of a dead Welsh king who Gansey hopes to raise from the dead with the help of his friends Adam, Ronan and Noah, the members of the books title The Raven Boys.
This book is full of twists and turns, all of them based in the supernatural and the mystery surrounding the ley line in their town of Henrietta and it's a gripping journey that you slip through without really realising how quickly the chapters are flying by. It is also helped by the sheer range of characters within and their different personalities. I loved Gansey who is seen as others as being the ultimate privelleged rich boy with his whole future ahead of him but instead he is the father figure to his friends, their rock and the one who has everyone's backs. In return they give him unquestioning loyalty and support him in his strange search for a dead Welsh king of whom they otherwise would not have known.
I also loved the character of Adam, the obligatory scholarship kid who has struggled his whole life to attend the school which will give him the opportunity to escape his lot in a small town life and run from his abusive father who beats him badly. I found it nice that despite the author moving immediately to bring Blue and Gansey together she allows a relationship to develop between Blue and Adam which leaves us wondering just how if Blue's true love is Gansey this will leave Adam feeling as the series moves on.
For me though one of the most intriguing characters was Ronan, the bad boy of the group, the one who is struggling to remain in school due to non attendance and bad grades who is at odds with his family. It is clear Ronan has just lost his father and is struggling to come to terms with this and it is clear that we have not fully uncovered the secrets in his story and there is going to be lots more to explore as the series progresses through the remaining 3 novels. I especially loved that Ronan, whilst often sullen and withdrawn is the one who ultimately stands up for Adam and helps him escape the abuse he is suffering at home.
All in all this novel really was hugely enjoyable, the ending did leave me with lots of questions about why characters made the decisions they did. The last sentence left me thinking if I'd just totally missed a page as it literally leaves you hanging on a sentence which is going to take lots of explaining but I'm sure is linked to the title of the second book in the series. I am definitely excited to dive into book 2, The Dream Thieves and would give this one a 4 out of 5 stars.