The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater

Title: The Dream Thieves
Author: Maggie Stiefvater
Publisher: Scholastic
Genre: Fantasy
Page Count: 438

A secret is a strange thing.

After waking the ley line (or corpse road, or fairy road), nothing is the same for Blue and her Raven Boys. Ronan, a boy broken and made savage from trauma, loses himself to the seduction of being the Greywaren: a being who can pull objects from the dream world into reality. Adam’s promise to be the eyes and ears of Cabeswater is consuming him as it attempts to work its will through him. Blue still can’t make out with anyone but poor dead Noah without risking killing whichever poor boy she decides to smooch. And to make things more complicated, a hitman has been sent to retrieve the Greywaren from Henrietta and decides to make out with Blue’s mom in the meantime. Life is rough.

I will start by saying that I liked the first book in this trilogy, The Raven Boys, a lot. But you know what? I freaking LOVED The Dream Thieves. Here is why.

The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater

Earlier this  year I totally fell in love with Maggie Stiefvater‘s The Scorpio Races,  so when I heard that she had a new release coming out this year I got pretty stoked. Alas, while The Raven Boys is definitely a solid read, it ain’t no Scorpio Races 😦 😦 😦 😦 😦 😦 😦 😦 😦 etc.

Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she’d been told that she would kill her true love.

Blue comes from a family of bona fide psychics, and every single one of those kooky ladies has told her that if and when she kisses her true love he will die. If that isn’t a total teenage love life buzz kill, I don’t know what is, man. Every year Blue accompanies her mother to an ancient burial ground on the Corpse Road, a ley line of mystical energy where, once a year, the spirits of those who are going to die in the next year manifest. Being the only non-psychic in a family full of clairvoyants, Blue has never seen a single dang spirit, but this year she sees one: a boy named Gansey from Aglionby, the local prep school. MEANWHILE. Gansey, who is really rich and kind of oblivious as to how much richer he is than the rest of the world, is really obsessed with finding Glendower, some old magical Welsh king he believes to be buried on the ley line in Henrietta. (In other words, Gansey is kind of a crazy old crack pot mystical conspiracy theorist in a teenage body). He’s supported by a hodge podge of outcasts from Aglionby: Rowen, a surly dude who discovered his father’s dead body; Adam, hyper-intelligent and ambitious trailer trash scholarship student; and Noah, some weird smudgy kid who never eats and seems to have social anxiety. FATE means Blue is destined to get sucked into the Raven Boys quest for MAGIC. Cue: danger, romance, etc. etc. etc.

I will start by saying that when I first read the blurb of this book, I was a little backed off by the true love/destiny feel of it. It seemed like Stiefvater was maybe going to head back into purple melodrama territory, and I don’t like her writing as much when it’s in that camp. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the overall tone, which is one of preordained mystery, class tension, and of repression: repressed emotions, repressed energies, repressed sexuality, respressed secrets, and repressed MAGIC, all just waiting to boil over and explode. The romantic melodrama contained in the first sentence was all but absent, which was sweet, sweet relief.