The Raven King by Maggie StiefvaterMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
I've never done any hard drugs but I imagine that this is exactly what a really bad acid trip would be like.
-It's so confusing and whimsical and nonsensical and full of words thrown haphazardly around to seem poetic.
-It makes no sense.
-It repeats itself endlessly.
-At first it's kinda fun in how strange and different it is but eventually you realise you're tired and frustrated from trying to make sense of it all and you just want it to be over.
So yeah. Not my fave.
I'll stand by this positive: this series has really fascinating, fun characters. I really enjoyed them all in their individual weirdnesses, plus in this book Adam is whining much less and Ronan is far less rude so I had a lot more time for them. Henry was a bit of a random last minute draft but whatever. I'm happy to include the token Asian, he seems cool enough.
But the story? Oh my lord. It's so RUBBISH.
There is a whole bunch of random magic with no rules, everyone is doing different magic, and quite honestly I'm still struggling with the fact that this series is mostly about Latin talking trees. They're on this huge important quest to save the talking trees but they also stop every now and then to go to a class or two, or stop in to visit the fam, or do a shift at a job that otherwise doesn't seem to exist. Like, I could not grasp the sense of time because one minute Gansey is talking about how I am going to find Glendower right now and the next minute he's taking Blue and Henry to visit his parents for lunch.
There's also a ton of random supplementary characters that are introduced but never really explored properly - for example, Neeve, who went missing in the first book and then was promptly forgotten about until it was convenient to reintroduce her. Or Mr Grey, who is actually pretty cool and helps people out a fair bit but otherwise isn't really mentioned a lot. I just have so many issues with continuity and consistency.
This book, nay, this entire series tries way too hard to be fancy and it just comes across as arrogant, facetious and obnoxious. It takes paragraphs to explain things and convoluted sentences distort what's actually happening into a lump of academic arrogance that, instead of telling the story, screams in your face, 'I AM A REALLY GREAT WRITER'. There are so many metaphors and symbols. . '...gasoline and gravel in his eyes ...' PLEASE. I really wish she'd focused more on story and less on pretty sentences. It just made it so dull and by the end I was skipping paragraphs because there's only so many times I can read excessive descriptions of nature.
Also, let me moan about the story a bit more. NOTHING has shock factor. Every single big reveal had me like, 'okay? Were we not supposed to figure that out?' or 'was that not already assumed?'
EXAMPLE:
(view spoiler)
But this is also a perfect example of why the magic was so hard to keep track of and what I mean about getting frustrated with a lack of consistency. Because (view spoiler)
Now I get that it's all about dreams and how messed up they get so I guess it's kind of poetic? Creative? Clever? to be this random, but it was such a chore to keep track of everything, and there were so many things that weren't cleared up or I just didn't understand at all.
Overall, this conclusion to the series left a bad taste in my mouth. I was actually kinda just waiting for Gansey to die by the end of it, and I really like that kid.
I'm sorry to be the bad guy and dislike something that people love so much, but this one was just a little to random for me. Such a shame, because they are really great characters.
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