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A review by caerrie
The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater
2.0
I'm so conflicted about this book. I hated it for pretty much the first half - it dragged, everything about the boys before they finally came to Blue's house bored me to tears, and the writing style is 100% not for me. It's incredibly pretentious. I don't even know where to start with it. It's clearly meant to be deep and pensive and mysterious, but mostly it just came off as rambly and obnoxious for me. The characters were an issue, too - from the get-go, they weren't *bad*, exactly, but there wasn't much I found endearing about them, either. And personally, it always bothers me if what draws you in to a book is more due to the narrative than the characters in it.
The one saving grace is the story, or rather, the main ideas. The way it's paced was off, to my taste the first third of the book could almost entirely be scrapped without changing anything about the plot - but there's something there. There's something that is actually fun and interesting and that eventually even makes some of the characters interesting. I just wish it hadn't taken the book so long to get there. And then in the end, it rushes through a ton of really momentous moments so breathlessly that I'm sure I've missed half of what was going on. This, as well as some of my annoyance with the writing style and characterisation, may however be due to the audiobook I was listening to - I wasn't a fan of the narrator, he never seemed to manage to keep the individual voices at all consistent, so things got very confusing at times.
The one saving grace is the story, or rather, the main ideas. The way it's paced was off, to my taste the first third of the book could almost entirely be scrapped without changing anything about the plot - but there's something there. There's something that is actually fun and interesting and that eventually even makes some of the characters interesting. I just wish it hadn't taken the book so long to get there. And then in the end, it rushes through a ton of really momentous moments so breathlessly that I'm sure I've missed half of what was going on. This, as well as some of my annoyance with the writing style and characterisation, may however be due to the audiobook I was listening to - I wasn't a fan of the narrator, he never seemed to manage to keep the individual voices at all consistent, so things got very confusing at times.