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4.28 AVERAGE
4.28 AVERAGE
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
adventurous
emotional
medium-paced
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
emotional
funny
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
emotional
lighthearted
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I adore these books and the characters. Even three books in, there's still a lot of mystery to unravel, but this one had a lot more magical excursions.
We're definitely seeing Persephone again, because Neeve reappeared. Persephone's soul is in the mirrors, and she left her body behind (unsure if it was on purpose or by accident). The reappearance of Neeve and the death of Persephone next to the mirrors seems very purposeful though.
I liked that Ronan and Blue had some more direct interactions in this book; he's always been somewhat cold towards her, or outwardly he seems to only tolerating her presence. But there were several instances in this book of Blue realizing, "Huh, he just saved my life" or "huh, he was worried about me", and after the last few scenes, it's clear he's just as much a ride or die friend for Blue as he is for Adam and Gansey.
I enjoyed Adam's growth as well. He seems to have gotten over the hurdle of assuming his well-off friends look down on him, which was a huge relief to me.
My one gripe is that I felt like there should've been a bit more urgency to finding Maura, but otherwise, I loved this book just as much as the others.
We're definitely seeing Persephone again, because Neeve reappeared. Persephone's soul is in the mirrors, and she left her body behind (unsure if it was on purpose or by accident). The reappearance of Neeve and the death of Persephone next to the mirrors seems very purposeful though.
I liked that Ronan and Blue had some more direct interactions in this book; he's always been somewhat cold towards her, or outwardly he seems to only tolerating her presence. But there were several instances in this book of Blue realizing, "Huh, he just saved my life" or "huh, he was worried about me", and after the last few scenes, it's clear he's just as much a ride or die friend for Blue as he is for Adam and Gansey.
I enjoyed Adam's growth as well. He seems to have gotten over the hurdle of assuming his well-off friends look down on him, which was a huge relief to me.
My one gripe is that I felt like there should've been a bit more urgency to finding Maura, but otherwise, I loved this book just as much as the others.
why isn't there more??
(Fully reviewed in my April 2016 reread.)
Merged review:
Originally read from Jan 5-8, 2015, then revisited in April 2016. I'm really mad at myself for misjudging my Raven Cycle reread by one day. If I'd only started rereading the series a single day earlier, I could have gotten to The Raven King on publication day. NOW THESE DATES WILL HAUNT ME FOREVER!!
But! As of this writing, I was about halfway through The Raven King, so I’m forcing myself to sit down and write a review for BLLB before its sequel completely empties my brain and I can’t think about anything else but TRK...
This is Blue’s book (obviously), the central conflict revolving around recovering her mother—and on the sidelines, the boys continue fleshing out their supernatural abilities and exploring the nature of Cabeswater, especially Adam as Persephone starts tutoring him in psychic ways~. Female familial relationships are super important to Blue as always, and her pain about missing her mother is so believable and sad.
(One thing, however, about 300 Fox Way: Blue’s narration throughout this series has kept mentioning how it’s filled fit to bursting with relatives, but it isn’t until BLLB that you actually get a sense of there being more women and children around than Maura, Blue, Calla, Orla, Persephone, and Jimi. Which sounded like a big household, to me, so for the longest time I really thought that was all of them? Until we now get mention of random cousins underfoot—my impression of the house had never actually pictured there being even more people around, because literally none of them have speaking roles. That’s one thing I wish Stiefvater had done slightly differently, to really impress upon us the over-full nature of 300 Fox Way: they don’t all need to have names and personalities and backstories, but just a conversation here and there would’ve gone a long way to me visualising that.)
ANYWAY. There are also a couple more awesome additions to the cast in the form of Gwenllian (I LOVE HERRRR) and the Greenmantles (I LOVE THEM); Piper Greenmantle is pretty much the best, you guys, I could read about her doing anything.
Random confession: my first time through this series, I had vaguely heard the term “Pynch” from fandom going into this book, but I straight-up thought that meant Piper ends up with Ronan somehow. I was very confused.
Looking at my fave quotes, I realise that a whole ton of them are about Adam and Ronan as always, because I have a situation; Adam’s issues with his father, as always; a bit of Gansey and Blue continuing their courtship between the lines; a bit of Noah being cute; and Maura & Mr. Gray being my everything.
Basically, I love ensembles, so I love these characters as an ensemble: it’s very hard for me to extricate them from each other and pinpoint any particular favourite aspect.
The first time I read this book it was 5 stars; one star docked this time, not because there’s anything especially wrong with it, but more that I don’t love it as unmitigatedly as I did The Dream Thieves. It is Very Good, expands the worldbuilding further, and nudges the storyline along the quest for Glendower. And it has a pretty awesome climax, and features spelunking in creepy caves, which is one of my favourite things. I think it’s just that, unlike in Dream Thieves, I have a harder time exactly summarising what happens in the plot, besides “their quest moves along a bit and they search for Maura”.
But it’s just so tremendously enjoyable and well-written prose-wise that you hardly notice or mind.
Approximately a million favourite quotes:
***
Ronan’s room was forbidden, but she looked inside anyway. His raven’s cage sat with its door ajar, impeccably and incongruously clean. His room was filled not so much with filth, but clutter: shovels and swords leaned in the corners, speakers and printers piled by the wall. And bizarre objects in between: an old suitcase with vines trailing out of it, a potted tree that seemed to be humming to itself, a single cowboy boot in the middle of the floor. A mask hung high on the wall, eyes wide, mouth gaping. It was blackened, as if by fire, and the edges were badly bitten, as if by a saw. Something that looked suspiciously like a tire track ran over one of its eyes. The mask made Blue think of words like survivor and destroyer.
She didn’t like it.
***
Returning to his desk, [Ronan] threw his feet up on it. This was forbidden, of course. He crossed his arms, tilted his chin back, closed his eyes. Instant insolence. This was the version of himself he prepared for Aglionby, for his older brother, Declan, and sometimes, for Gansey.
Ronan was always saying that he never lied, but he wore a liar’s face.
***
“Here we are, living among the provincials!” Colin Greenmantle leaned out the window. Down below, a herd of cows looked up at him. “Piper, come look at these cows. This one asshole is looking right at me. ‘Colin,’ says this cow, ‘you are really living among the provincials now.’ ”
Piper said, “I’m in the bath.”
[NOTE FROM JULIE: I need Colin Greenmantle to be played by Peter Serafinowicz in a movie adaptation, and I need it now.]
***
She tossed the knife into the sink, where it would remain until it died. Piper was not much for housework. She had a very narrow skill set. She drifted toward the bedroom, on her way to have a bath or take a nap or start a war. “Don’t get us killed.”
***
That night, not long after he returned from work, Adam heard a knock at his church apartment door. When he answered it, he was first surprised that the person on the other side was real, and then he was surprised that the person was Gansey and not Ronan.
***
“You can be just friends with people, you know,” Orla said. “I think it’s crazy how you’re in love with all those raven boys.”
Orla wasn’t wrong, of course. But what she didn’t realize about Blue and her boys was that they were all in love with one another. She was no less obsessed with them than they were with her, or one another, analyzing every conversation and gesture, drawing out every joke into a longer and longer running gag, spending each moment either with one another or thinking about when next they would be with one another. Blue was perfectly aware that it was possible to have a friendship that wasn’t all-encompassing, that wasn’t blinding, deafening, maddening, quickening. It was just that now that she’d had this kind, she didn’t want the other.
[NOTE FROM JULIE: Okay so.This is actually kind of against my philosophy wrt friendships—the all-consuming ones are, in my experience, always the ones that blaze out horrifically by the end because they’re also toxic and jealousy-ridden and don’t leave you enough room to be yourself sans them—but it’s super cute for, you know, fiction and these fictional characters.]
***
Piper’s voice remained as the rest of her left. “I’m tired of your hobbies. This is the worst vacation I’ve ever been on.”
***
He wondered if Gansey and the others had really gone out in the rain to explore Coopers Mountain. Part of him hoped that they hadn’t, though he tried his best to kill the baser emotions regarding his friends — if he let them run wild, he would be jealous of Ronan, jealous of Blue, jealous of Gansey with either of the other two. Any combination that didn’t involve Adam would provoke a degree of discomfort, if he let it.
He wouldn’t let it.
Don’t fight with Gansey. Don’t fight with Blue. Don’t fight with Gansey. Don’t fight with Blue.
There was no point telling himself not to fight with Ronan. They would fight again, because Ronan was still breathing.
***
“Democracy’s a farce,” Ronan said, and Adam smirked, a private, small thing that was inherently exclusionary. An expression, in fact, that he could’ve very well learned from Ronan.
***
As they moved through the old barn, Adam felt Ronan’s eyes glance off him and away, his disinterest practiced but incomplete. Adam wondered if anyone else noticed. Part of him wished they did and immediately felt bad, because it was vanity, really: See, Adam Parrish is wantable, worthy of a crush, not just by anyone, someone like Ronan, who could want Gansey or anyone else and chose Adam for his hungry eyes.
Maybe he was wrong. He could be wrong.
I am unknowable, Ronan Lynch.
***
He studied his hands and admitted, “I’ve dreamt him a box of EpiPens. I dream cures for stings all the time. I carry one. I put them in the Pig. I have them all over Monmouth.”
***
Ronan said, “Matthew’s mine. He’s one of mine.”
Adam didn’t understand.
“I dreamt him, Adam!” Ronan was angry — every one of his emotions that wasn’t happiness was anger. “That means that when — if something happens to me, he becomes just like them. Just like Mom.”
Every memory Adam possessed of Ronan and his younger brother reframed itself. Ronan’s tireless devotion. Matthew’s similarity to Aurora, a dream creature herself. Declan’s eternal position as an outsider, neither a dreamer nor a dream. Only half of Ronan’s surviving family was real.
***
Declan had left for college in D.C., but he still made the four-hour drive each Sunday to attend church with his brothers, a gesture so extravagant that even Ronan seemed forced to admit that it was kindness.
***
“Was it always the same song? Was it the murder squash song?”
“Oh, God.” The floorboards felt cool on the bottoms of his bare feet. For some reason, the feeling was sensuous and distracting, a reminder of Blue’s skin. Gansey closed his eyes. “This was a simpler time, before that had been unleashed on the world. I cannot believe how obsessed Ronan and Noah are with that song. Ronan was talking about getting the T-shirt. Can you imagine him in it?”
***
There was nothing inherently guilty about the moment except that Gansey burned with guilt and thrill and desire and the nebulous feeling of being truly known. It was on the inside of him, and the inside was all Noah ever really paid attention to.
The other boy wore a knowing expression.
“Don’t tell the others,” Gansey said.
“I’m dead,” Noah replied. “Not stupid.”
***
“I’ve never met someone else with a curse.”
“WHAT’S YOURS?”
“If I kiss my true love, he’ll die.”
Jesse nodded as if to say yep, that’s a good one.
***
There was still something stretched thin about his expression. He looked, in fact, like he had in the cave, his face streaked and unfamiliar. It was so strange to see him without his Richard Campbell Gansey III guise on in public that Blue couldn’t stop staring at his face. No — it wasn’t his face. It was the way he stood, his shoulders shrugged, chin ducked, gaze from below uncertain eyebrows.
“SHE WAS ALL RIGHT,” Jesse assured him.
“My head knew that,” Gansey said. “But the rest of me didn’t.”
***
His mind supplied the image: Gansey convulsing on the ground, covered in blood, Ronan crumpled beside him in grief. It had been months since Cabeswater showed him the vision, but he had not forgotten it. Nor had he forgotten how, in the vision, it had been Adam’s fault.
His heart was a grave.
If it’s your fault, Adam thought, you can stop it.
***
Ronan crouched by the pew again, studying the list, his fingers running idly over his stubble as he thought. When he wasn’t trying to look like an asshole, his face looked very different, and for a tilting moment, Adam felt the startling inequality of their relationship: Ronan knew Adam, but Adam wasn’t sure he knew Ronan, after all.
[NOTE FROM JULIE: I love this slow shift of Adam taking a step back on his “I am unknowable” stance, and realising Ronan’s depths.]
***
Gansey turned to Adam, finally. He was still wearing his glorious kingly face, Richard Campbell Gansey III, white knight, but his eyes were uncertain. Is this okay?
Was it okay? Adam had turned down so many offers of help from Gansey. Money for school, money for food, money for rent. Pity and charity, Adam had thought. For so long, he’d wanted Gansey to see him as an equal, but it was possible that all this time, the only person who needed to see that was Adam.
Now he could see that it wasn’t charity Gansey was offering. It was just truth.
And something else: friendship of the unshakable kind. Friendship you could swear on. That could be busted nearly to breaking and come back stronger than before.
***
It was amazing that she and Ronan didn’t get along better, because they were different brands of the same impossible stuff.
***
“We’re scrying?” Noah sat up straight.
Adam struggled to explain. “Cabeswater speaks one language, and I speak another. I can get the broad idea from reading the cards. But it’s harder to get the specifics of how to fix the alignment. So I’m scrying. I do it all the time. It’s just efficient, Noah.”
“An efficient way to get your naked soul stolen by forces of raw evil, maybe,” Noah said.
Blue exchanged a look with Adam. “I don’t believe in raw evil.”
Noah said, “It doesn’t care if you believe in it.”
[NOTE FROM JULIE: SPOILERS FOR THE RAVEN KING BELOW:]
***
“And then you stopped breathing,” Noah said. He slunk to his feet. “I told you. I told you it was a bad idea, and nobody ever listens to me. ‘Oh, we’ll be fine, Noah, you’re such a worrywart’ and next thing you know you’re in some kind of death thrall. Nobody ever says, ‘Noah, you know what you were right thanks for saving my life because being dead would suck.’ They just always —”
***
“It’s a stable number, three. Fives and sevens are good, too, but three is the best. Things are always growing to three or shrinking to three. Best to start there. Two is a terrible number. Two is for rivalry and fighting and murder.”
“Or marriage,” Adam said, thinking.
“Same thing,” Persephone replied.
[NOTE FROM JULIE: MAKES ME THINK OF GREENMANTLESSSS]
***
Adam’s breath caught. He asked in a low voice, “Can you see your own death?”
“Everyone sees it,” Persephone said mildly. “Most people make themselves stop looking, though.”
“I don’t see my own death,” Adam said. But even as he said it, he felt the corner of the knowledge bite into him. It was now, it was coming, it had already happened. Somewhere, somewhen, he was dying.
“Ah, you see,” she said.
“That’s not the same as knowing how.”
“You didn’t say how.”
***
“Gwenllian’s in the tree in the backyard,” Calla said. “She’s singing at some birds who hate her.”
***
“I’m going in,” Gansey said as Ronan sat down on the step beside Adam. As Gansey shut the door behind him, he heard Adam say, “I don’t want to talk,” and Ronan reply, “The fuck would I talk about?”
***
Both of the boys were unsettling — Adam Parrish, in particular, had a curious face. Not as in, he was a curious person. But rather that there was something peculiar about his facial features. He was an alien, handsome specimen of this western Virginia species; feather-boned, hollow-cheeked, eyebrows fair and barely visible. He was feral and raw-boned by way of those Civil War portraits. Brother fought brother while their farms ran to ruins —
And Ronan Lynch looked like Niall Lynch, which was to say, he looked like an asshole.
***
Ronan Lynch smiled then, too, and it was a weapon.
***
“And this cave seems to match the description I gave you?” Piper asked.
“Why do you have a description of a cave?” Greenmantle asked.
“Shut up before you hurt yourself,” she told him kindly.
***
Greenmantle, wary of this man identifying him later on, took a tactful step back into the shadows to hide his face. He backed directly into someone’s chest.
“Colin,” the Gray Man said. “I’m disappointed. Didn’t you read the envelope?”
“Oh, for the love of the saints,” Greenmantle wailed. “This was not my idea.”
***
“No, you know what?” Piper demanded. “I am beyond tired of you showing up and throwing your weight around. I was here first, and I had plans. Men, do man things.”
Greenmantle hadn’t the faintest idea of what that meant, but Morris and Beast headed immediately for the Gray Man as Dittley rose to his feet.
The Gray Man dispatched Beast to either the grave or the infirmary in a disappointing two seconds. It was Morris who turned out to be a better match. They fought quietly, all bruised breaths and sighed punches, as Jesse Dittley put his gun down and held Greenmantle’s wrists like a petulant child.
***
Greenmantle could not believe how unbelievably dead the giant man was. He was so very, very dead, and punctured. There were holes in him. Greenmantle couldn’t stop looking at the holes. They probably went all the way through him.
“Piper,” he said. “You just shot that man.”
“No one else was doing anything, seriously. All of this dick slinging!” Piper said. To the Gray Man, she said, “Drag him into the cave.”
“No,” the Gray Man said.
“No?” She had her shooting-people face on — which was to say, the face that she wore all the time.
***
The dread was like blood filling her stomach. Did they trust Cabeswater? That was the question. Did that pit stretch out of Cabeswater’s reach? That was the second question.
“I can’t live with this,” Gansey said. “If anything has happened.”
“You’ll never be a king,” Gwenllian said. “Don’t you know how war works?” But her bitterness wasn’t really for Gansey; it was a jeer for someone who had buried her or been buried with her long ago.
***
Ducking his head, he pulled off his ghost light and hung it over her shoulder.
She didn’t bother to say, But you’ll be waiting in darkness. Nor did she say, If I vanish immediately into the lake, you’ll have to find your way out of here sightless. Because he’d already known both these things when he’d given it to her.
Instead she said, “You know, you’re not such a shithead.”
“No,” Ronan replied, “really I am.”
***
The Gray Man stood by her elbow, and when she turned, she made a face, and then she touched his stubbled cheek.
“Mr. Gray,” she said.
He just nodded. He traced one of her eyebrows with his finger in an efficient, competent, in-love kind of way, and then he looked to Blue.
She said, “Let’s go find the others.”
(Fully reviewed in my April 2016 reread.)
Merged review:
Originally read from Jan 5-8, 2015, then revisited in April 2016. I'm really mad at myself for misjudging my Raven Cycle reread by one day. If I'd only started rereading the series a single day earlier, I could have gotten to The Raven King on publication day. NOW THESE DATES WILL HAUNT ME FOREVER!!
But! As of this writing, I was about halfway through The Raven King, so I’m forcing myself to sit down and write a review for BLLB before its sequel completely empties my brain and I can’t think about anything else but TRK...
This is Blue’s book (obviously), the central conflict revolving around recovering her mother—and on the sidelines, the boys continue fleshing out their supernatural abilities and exploring the nature of Cabeswater, especially Adam as Persephone starts tutoring him in psychic ways~. Female familial relationships are super important to Blue as always, and her pain about missing her mother is so believable and sad.
(One thing, however, about 300 Fox Way: Blue’s narration throughout this series has kept mentioning how it’s filled fit to bursting with relatives, but it isn’t until BLLB that you actually get a sense of there being more women and children around than Maura, Blue, Calla, Orla, Persephone, and Jimi. Which sounded like a big household, to me, so for the longest time I really thought that was all of them? Until we now get mention of random cousins underfoot—my impression of the house had never actually pictured there being even more people around, because literally none of them have speaking roles. That’s one thing I wish Stiefvater had done slightly differently, to really impress upon us the over-full nature of 300 Fox Way: they don’t all need to have names and personalities and backstories, but just a conversation here and there would’ve gone a long way to me visualising that.)
ANYWAY. There are also a couple more awesome additions to the cast in the form of Gwenllian (I LOVE HERRRR) and the Greenmantles (I LOVE THEM); Piper Greenmantle is pretty much the best, you guys, I could read about her doing anything.
Spoiler
It’s so endlessly hilarious to me that Colin Greenmantle is built up to be this terrifying supervillain, one who even threatened the existence of Mr. Gray… but when you finally meet Colin, he is so utterly and completely trounced by his wife. It’s great. She’s so great.Random confession: my first time through this series, I had vaguely heard the term “Pynch” from fandom going into this book, but I straight-up thought that meant Piper ends up with Ronan somehow. I was very confused.
Looking at my fave quotes, I realise that a whole ton of them are about Adam and Ronan as always, because I have a situation; Adam’s issues with his father, as always; a bit of Gansey and Blue continuing their courtship between the lines; a bit of Noah being cute; and Maura & Mr. Gray being my everything.
Basically, I love ensembles, so I love these characters as an ensemble: it’s very hard for me to extricate them from each other and pinpoint any particular favourite aspect.
The first time I read this book it was 5 stars; one star docked this time, not because there’s anything especially wrong with it, but more that I don’t love it as unmitigatedly as I did The Dream Thieves. It is Very Good, expands the worldbuilding further, and nudges the storyline along the quest for Glendower. And it has a pretty awesome climax, and features spelunking in creepy caves, which is one of my favourite things. I think it’s just that, unlike in Dream Thieves, I have a harder time exactly summarising what happens in the plot, besides “their quest moves along a bit and they search for Maura”.
But it’s just so tremendously enjoyable and well-written prose-wise that you hardly notice or mind.
Approximately a million favourite quotes:
Spoiler
“Gansey!” Blue shouted, or maybe it was Adam, or maybe it was Ronan.***
Ronan’s room was forbidden, but she looked inside anyway. His raven’s cage sat with its door ajar, impeccably and incongruously clean. His room was filled not so much with filth, but clutter: shovels and swords leaned in the corners, speakers and printers piled by the wall. And bizarre objects in between: an old suitcase with vines trailing out of it, a potted tree that seemed to be humming to itself, a single cowboy boot in the middle of the floor. A mask hung high on the wall, eyes wide, mouth gaping. It was blackened, as if by fire, and the edges were badly bitten, as if by a saw. Something that looked suspiciously like a tire track ran over one of its eyes. The mask made Blue think of words like survivor and destroyer.
She didn’t like it.
***
Returning to his desk, [Ronan] threw his feet up on it. This was forbidden, of course. He crossed his arms, tilted his chin back, closed his eyes. Instant insolence. This was the version of himself he prepared for Aglionby, for his older brother, Declan, and sometimes, for Gansey.
Ronan was always saying that he never lied, but he wore a liar’s face.
***
“Here we are, living among the provincials!” Colin Greenmantle leaned out the window. Down below, a herd of cows looked up at him. “Piper, come look at these cows. This one asshole is looking right at me. ‘Colin,’ says this cow, ‘you are really living among the provincials now.’ ”
Piper said, “I’m in the bath.”
[NOTE FROM JULIE: I need Colin Greenmantle to be played by Peter Serafinowicz in a movie adaptation, and I need it now.]
***
She tossed the knife into the sink, where it would remain until it died. Piper was not much for housework. She had a very narrow skill set. She drifted toward the bedroom, on her way to have a bath or take a nap or start a war. “Don’t get us killed.”
***
That night, not long after he returned from work, Adam heard a knock at his church apartment door. When he answered it, he was first surprised that the person on the other side was real, and then he was surprised that the person was Gansey and not Ronan.
***
“You can be just friends with people, you know,” Orla said. “I think it’s crazy how you’re in love with all those raven boys.”
Orla wasn’t wrong, of course. But what she didn’t realize about Blue and her boys was that they were all in love with one another. She was no less obsessed with them than they were with her, or one another, analyzing every conversation and gesture, drawing out every joke into a longer and longer running gag, spending each moment either with one another or thinking about when next they would be with one another. Blue was perfectly aware that it was possible to have a friendship that wasn’t all-encompassing, that wasn’t blinding, deafening, maddening, quickening. It was just that now that she’d had this kind, she didn’t want the other.
[NOTE FROM JULIE: Okay so.This is actually kind of against my philosophy wrt friendships—the all-consuming ones are, in my experience, always the ones that blaze out horrifically by the end because they’re also toxic and jealousy-ridden and don’t leave you enough room to be yourself sans them—but it’s super cute for, you know, fiction and these fictional characters.]
***
Piper’s voice remained as the rest of her left. “I’m tired of your hobbies. This is the worst vacation I’ve ever been on.”
***
He wondered if Gansey and the others had really gone out in the rain to explore Coopers Mountain. Part of him hoped that they hadn’t, though he tried his best to kill the baser emotions regarding his friends — if he let them run wild, he would be jealous of Ronan, jealous of Blue, jealous of Gansey with either of the other two. Any combination that didn’t involve Adam would provoke a degree of discomfort, if he let it.
He wouldn’t let it.
Don’t fight with Gansey. Don’t fight with Blue. Don’t fight with Gansey. Don’t fight with Blue.
There was no point telling himself not to fight with Ronan. They would fight again, because Ronan was still breathing.
***
“Democracy’s a farce,” Ronan said, and Adam smirked, a private, small thing that was inherently exclusionary. An expression, in fact, that he could’ve very well learned from Ronan.
***
As they moved through the old barn, Adam felt Ronan’s eyes glance off him and away, his disinterest practiced but incomplete. Adam wondered if anyone else noticed. Part of him wished they did and immediately felt bad, because it was vanity, really: See, Adam Parrish is wantable, worthy of a crush, not just by anyone, someone like Ronan, who could want Gansey or anyone else and chose Adam for his hungry eyes.
Maybe he was wrong. He could be wrong.
I am unknowable, Ronan Lynch.
***
He studied his hands and admitted, “I’ve dreamt him a box of EpiPens. I dream cures for stings all the time. I carry one. I put them in the Pig. I have them all over Monmouth.”
***
Ronan said, “Matthew’s mine. He’s one of mine.”
Adam didn’t understand.
“I dreamt him, Adam!” Ronan was angry — every one of his emotions that wasn’t happiness was anger. “That means that when — if something happens to me, he becomes just like them. Just like Mom.”
Every memory Adam possessed of Ronan and his younger brother reframed itself. Ronan’s tireless devotion. Matthew’s similarity to Aurora, a dream creature herself. Declan’s eternal position as an outsider, neither a dreamer nor a dream. Only half of Ronan’s surviving family was real.
***
Declan had left for college in D.C., but he still made the four-hour drive each Sunday to attend church with his brothers, a gesture so extravagant that even Ronan seemed forced to admit that it was kindness.
***
“Was it always the same song? Was it the murder squash song?”
“Oh, God.” The floorboards felt cool on the bottoms of his bare feet. For some reason, the feeling was sensuous and distracting, a reminder of Blue’s skin. Gansey closed his eyes. “This was a simpler time, before that had been unleashed on the world. I cannot believe how obsessed Ronan and Noah are with that song. Ronan was talking about getting the T-shirt. Can you imagine him in it?”
***
There was nothing inherently guilty about the moment except that Gansey burned with guilt and thrill and desire and the nebulous feeling of being truly known. It was on the inside of him, and the inside was all Noah ever really paid attention to.
The other boy wore a knowing expression.
“Don’t tell the others,” Gansey said.
“I’m dead,” Noah replied. “Not stupid.”
***
“I’ve never met someone else with a curse.”
“WHAT’S YOURS?”
“If I kiss my true love, he’ll die.”
Jesse nodded as if to say yep, that’s a good one.
***
There was still something stretched thin about his expression. He looked, in fact, like he had in the cave, his face streaked and unfamiliar. It was so strange to see him without his Richard Campbell Gansey III guise on in public that Blue couldn’t stop staring at his face. No — it wasn’t his face. It was the way he stood, his shoulders shrugged, chin ducked, gaze from below uncertain eyebrows.
“SHE WAS ALL RIGHT,” Jesse assured him.
“My head knew that,” Gansey said. “But the rest of me didn’t.”
***
His mind supplied the image: Gansey convulsing on the ground, covered in blood, Ronan crumpled beside him in grief. It had been months since Cabeswater showed him the vision, but he had not forgotten it. Nor had he forgotten how, in the vision, it had been Adam’s fault.
His heart was a grave.
If it’s your fault, Adam thought, you can stop it.
***
Ronan crouched by the pew again, studying the list, his fingers running idly over his stubble as he thought. When he wasn’t trying to look like an asshole, his face looked very different, and for a tilting moment, Adam felt the startling inequality of their relationship: Ronan knew Adam, but Adam wasn’t sure he knew Ronan, after all.
[NOTE FROM JULIE: I love this slow shift of Adam taking a step back on his “I am unknowable” stance, and realising Ronan’s depths.]
***
Gansey turned to Adam, finally. He was still wearing his glorious kingly face, Richard Campbell Gansey III, white knight, but his eyes were uncertain. Is this okay?
Was it okay? Adam had turned down so many offers of help from Gansey. Money for school, money for food, money for rent. Pity and charity, Adam had thought. For so long, he’d wanted Gansey to see him as an equal, but it was possible that all this time, the only person who needed to see that was Adam.
Now he could see that it wasn’t charity Gansey was offering. It was just truth.
And something else: friendship of the unshakable kind. Friendship you could swear on. That could be busted nearly to breaking and come back stronger than before.
***
It was amazing that she and Ronan didn’t get along better, because they were different brands of the same impossible stuff.
***
“We’re scrying?” Noah sat up straight.
Adam struggled to explain. “Cabeswater speaks one language, and I speak another. I can get the broad idea from reading the cards. But it’s harder to get the specifics of how to fix the alignment. So I’m scrying. I do it all the time. It’s just efficient, Noah.”
“An efficient way to get your naked soul stolen by forces of raw evil, maybe,” Noah said.
Blue exchanged a look with Adam. “I don’t believe in raw evil.”
Noah said, “It doesn’t care if you believe in it.”
[NOTE FROM JULIE: SPOILERS FOR THE RAVEN KING BELOW:
Spoiler
Welp, this is perfect foreshadowing for TRK :(((***
“And then you stopped breathing,” Noah said. He slunk to his feet. “I told you. I told you it was a bad idea, and nobody ever listens to me. ‘Oh, we’ll be fine, Noah, you’re such a worrywart’ and next thing you know you’re in some kind of death thrall. Nobody ever says, ‘Noah, you know what you were right thanks for saving my life because being dead would suck.’ They just always —”
***
“It’s a stable number, three. Fives and sevens are good, too, but three is the best. Things are always growing to three or shrinking to three. Best to start there. Two is a terrible number. Two is for rivalry and fighting and murder.”
“Or marriage,” Adam said, thinking.
“Same thing,” Persephone replied.
[NOTE FROM JULIE: MAKES ME THINK OF GREENMANTLESSSS]
***
Adam’s breath caught. He asked in a low voice, “Can you see your own death?”
“Everyone sees it,” Persephone said mildly. “Most people make themselves stop looking, though.”
“I don’t see my own death,” Adam said. But even as he said it, he felt the corner of the knowledge bite into him. It was now, it was coming, it had already happened. Somewhere, somewhen, he was dying.
“Ah, you see,” she said.
“That’s not the same as knowing how.”
“You didn’t say how.”
***
“Gwenllian’s in the tree in the backyard,” Calla said. “She’s singing at some birds who hate her.”
***
“I’m going in,” Gansey said as Ronan sat down on the step beside Adam. As Gansey shut the door behind him, he heard Adam say, “I don’t want to talk,” and Ronan reply, “The fuck would I talk about?”
***
Both of the boys were unsettling — Adam Parrish, in particular, had a curious face. Not as in, he was a curious person. But rather that there was something peculiar about his facial features. He was an alien, handsome specimen of this western Virginia species; feather-boned, hollow-cheeked, eyebrows fair and barely visible. He was feral and raw-boned by way of those Civil War portraits. Brother fought brother while their farms ran to ruins —
And Ronan Lynch looked like Niall Lynch, which was to say, he looked like an asshole.
***
Ronan Lynch smiled then, too, and it was a weapon.
***
“And this cave seems to match the description I gave you?” Piper asked.
“Why do you have a description of a cave?” Greenmantle asked.
“Shut up before you hurt yourself,” she told him kindly.
***
Greenmantle, wary of this man identifying him later on, took a tactful step back into the shadows to hide his face. He backed directly into someone’s chest.
“Colin,” the Gray Man said. “I’m disappointed. Didn’t you read the envelope?”
“Oh, for the love of the saints,” Greenmantle wailed. “This was not my idea.”
***
“No, you know what?” Piper demanded. “I am beyond tired of you showing up and throwing your weight around. I was here first, and I had plans. Men, do man things.”
Greenmantle hadn’t the faintest idea of what that meant, but Morris and Beast headed immediately for the Gray Man as Dittley rose to his feet.
The Gray Man dispatched Beast to either the grave or the infirmary in a disappointing two seconds. It was Morris who turned out to be a better match. They fought quietly, all bruised breaths and sighed punches, as Jesse Dittley put his gun down and held Greenmantle’s wrists like a petulant child.
***
Greenmantle could not believe how unbelievably dead the giant man was. He was so very, very dead, and punctured. There were holes in him. Greenmantle couldn’t stop looking at the holes. They probably went all the way through him.
“Piper,” he said. “You just shot that man.”
“No one else was doing anything, seriously. All of this dick slinging!” Piper said. To the Gray Man, she said, “Drag him into the cave.”
“No,” the Gray Man said.
“No?” She had her shooting-people face on — which was to say, the face that she wore all the time.
***
The dread was like blood filling her stomach. Did they trust Cabeswater? That was the question. Did that pit stretch out of Cabeswater’s reach? That was the second question.
“I can’t live with this,” Gansey said. “If anything has happened.”
“You’ll never be a king,” Gwenllian said. “Don’t you know how war works?” But her bitterness wasn’t really for Gansey; it was a jeer for someone who had buried her or been buried with her long ago.
***
Ducking his head, he pulled off his ghost light and hung it over her shoulder.
She didn’t bother to say, But you’ll be waiting in darkness. Nor did she say, If I vanish immediately into the lake, you’ll have to find your way out of here sightless. Because he’d already known both these things when he’d given it to her.
Instead she said, “You know, you’re not such a shithead.”
“No,” Ronan replied, “really I am.”
***
The Gray Man stood by her elbow, and when she turned, she made a face, and then she touched his stubbled cheek.
“Mr. Gray,” she said.
He just nodded. He traced one of her eyebrows with his finger in an efficient, competent, in-love kind of way, and then he looked to Blue.
She said, “Let’s go find the others.”
adventurous
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes