Blue Sargent Kisses Her True Love, He Dies

Boys in a Camaro, Looking for a Dead Welsh King

Here’s the setup, and I promise it’s weirder than it sounds written out plainly. Blue Sargent comes from a family of clairvoyants in the fictional town of Henrietta, Virginia. She has no psychic ability of her own, except one very specific, very inconvenient talent: she amplifies the visions of everyone around her. She’s also been told her whole life that if she kisses her true love, he will die. Cool. Normal. Nothing to worry about there.

Then there’s Gansey. Richard Campbell Gansey III, obscenely rich, driving a orange Camaro he’s named Pig, obsessed to the point of self destruction with finding the tomb of a dead Welsh king he believes is buried somewhere along a ley line running through Henrietta. He’s not alone. He’s got Ronan Lynch, who is grief and rage wearing a leather jacket, and who can pull objects out of his dreams into the real world (a detail the book plants early and then lets sit there quietly ticking like a bomb). He’s got Adam Parrish, the scholarship kid whose home life is genuinely upsetting and whose pride is the most interesting kind of tragic flaw, the kind that makes you want to shake him and hug him in the same breath. And he’s got Noah, who is, well. You’ll figure Noah out. I did not figure Noah out as fast as I should have, and I’m still a little annoyed about that.

Blue and the boys collide because Gansey saw a dead spirit on St. Mark’s Eve, the same night Blue watches her mother’s psychic friends read the same energy. And that spirit had a name. His name. Which means, according to the mythology this book has already trained you to believe in, that Gansey is either Blue’s true love, or the person she’ll kill by loving him. No pressure.

Slow Burn Is a Compliment Until It Isn’t

Look, I need to be honest about something before I gush, because this book earns the gushing but it also earns some side eye. The plot of The Raven Boys, if you tried to summarize the actual events that happen, is thin. Teens drive around Virginia. Teens research ley lines in a library. Teens have loaded conversations in a Camaro. A significant percentage of this book is atmosphere, in the same way a significant percentage of a candle is wax and not flame. If you go in wanting a fantasy quest with clear stakes escalating chapter over chapter, you might find yourself checking how many pages are left and getting a little restless. I did, the first time through, somewhere around the middle when I kept waiting for the ley line hunt to actually produce something.

But here’s the thing: Stiefvater’s prose is doing so much work that the thinness of plot almost doesn’t matter, and by the second half I’d stopped counting pages entirely. She writes teenage boys with a specificity that most YA doesn’t bother with. Ronan isn’t just “the broody one,” he’s built out of grief for his dead father and a barely contained violence that the book keeps hinting has a source we don’t understand yet. Adam’s dignity, and how brutally that dignity gets tested, is some of the best character work I’ve read in the genre. There’s a scene where Adam’s home situation becomes unmistakably, quietly awful, no melodrama, just cold, matter of fact awfulness, and it recalibrated how I read every scene with him afterward.

I read most of this curled up on my sister’s couch during a visit where I was supposed to be helping her pack for a move and instead disappeared into Henrietta for six hours while boxes sat half taped around me. She was annoyed. I don’t blame her. That’s the kind of book this is, the kind that makes you a bad houseguest.

My one real complaint, besides the pacing: Blue herself takes a while to become as vivid as the boys around her. For a book named partly for her prophecy, she spends a lot of book one reacting to the raven boys rather than driving her own story, and I wanted more of her interiority earlier. That gets better in later books, but book one asks you to trust that it’s coming.

Am I overrating this because I’m a sucker for ensemble casts with one dead-eyed rich kid, one feral one, and one sweetheart holding it together with tape and stubbornness? Maybe. I’ve asked myself that. But I don’t think so, because the sentences themselves are doing something. Stiefvater writes weather and cars and cornfields like they have moods. That’s not a small skill.

If you want to grab a copy for yourself, here’s a link to find it on Amazon, though honestly, don’t start here if you’re not ready to buy the next three immediately, because this one ends on a note that is not designed for patience.

This is a book about a girl who was told she’d kill the boy she loved with a kiss, and somehow that’s the least strange thing happening in it.

About Maggie Stiefvater

Maggie Stiefvater lives on a Virginia farm with a genuinely alarming number of animals, restores old cars in her actual garage the way other authors might mention a hobby of gardening, and writes with the specific, slightly feral confidence of someone who has personally changed a car’s oil and also personally believed in ghosts. She started as a portrait artist and illustrator before fiction, which tracks, because her books read like she’s painting scenes rather than plotting them. She’s also the kind of author who will tell you in interviews that she does deep research into welsh mythology and ley line theory the way other people research grocery lists, thoroughly and a little obsessively.

If Henrietta Got Under Your Skin, Read These Next

The rest of the Raven Cycle, obviously (The Dream Thieves, Blue Lily Lily Blue, The Raven King), because book one is a slow fuse and the later books are the explosion.

All the Crooked Saints, also by Stiefvater, for the same small town magical realism vibe without the series commitment.

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo, for another ensemble cast where the found family chemistry carries as much weight as the plot.

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, if you want the adult, darker cousin of this same secret societies and old money magic energy.

For your book club

1. Blue’s prophecy hangs over the entire book without ever being explained. Did the ambiguity work for you, or did you want more concrete rules for how the magic operates?
2. Gansey is obsessed with finding Glendower to the point of financial and emotional self destruction. Is that obsession romantic, or is it a red flag the book wants you to notice?
3. Adam’s storyline is the most grounded, least fantastical part of the book. Why do you think Stiefvater chose to make his conflict so realistic against a backdrop of ley lines and psychics?
4. Ronan’s ability to bring things out of his dreams is introduced almost casually. What do you think that choice signals about how this series will handle its bigger reveals?
5. If you’d never read a synopsis going in, when did you first suspect what was going on with Noah, and how did that change your reading of earlier scenes?