Review by abitbetterbooks - Greywaren

abitbetterbooks 's review for:

Greywaren by Maggie Stiefvater

adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense 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: Complicated

Undecided on the rating here so I’ll let it percolate a little bit more. I almost want to listen to it again immediately to pick up on all of the finer details.

As always, narration by Will Patton was absolutely incredible. I think that his voice and Maggie’s work were made for each other. In some ways, I think I am more lenient with Maggie’s writing when listening because I’m always having such a wonderful time enjoying the inflection and power in the narration that I’m less likely to pick apart things that bother me or notice when things don’t line up the way they should.

This was in many ways, a beautiful conclusion. The characters got the endings that they deserved and everything felt beautifully concluded in a way that left the reader satisfied but also make us ponder the future of the characters a little bit more. I think I will think about this series a lot in the future and have these beautifully rendered characters alive in my brain for a long time.

That being said, and all of the respect in the world to Maggie Stiefvater, I do think that the magic system got a bit too big for its breeches in this story. I know that you have to increase stakes and scale as you move through a series but I think that

so many people / things being dreams ended up making the idea of dreamers feel less special, and also make it feel less realistic that Niall Lynch wouldn’t have known about or told Ronan about sweetmetals. There were clearly a ton of people who knew about dreams needing them and were operating black markets in the same circles that Niall had been a part of.

I still have mixed feelings about Bryde and I need to hash those out a bit more.

Content Warnings