Tuesday, July 30, 2013

[Review] The Dream Thieves *****

Firstly, I want to apologize to everyone who can't read these books yet. I feel like I'm living in a dream because I've been lucky enough to get my hands on ARCs of two books that I have been drooling over for almost a year. I hope that by reviewing these now it will excite anyone who reads this blog to go out and get these when they come out. PLEASE do! I'm ordering a signed copy from Fountain Bookstore as we speak!

The Story
The Dream Thieves continues where The Raven Boys left off, with a few of our favorites changed and secrets revealed. If you haven't read The Raven Boys yet, I won't spoil you on any of the juicy details, but I'll give you the short version of the tale: The story centers around Blue, a girl from a family of psychics and mediums who has no power of her own except to enhance the abilities of others. All her life she has been told that if she kisses her true love, she'll kill him. Luckily for Blue, she has no interest in finding her true love among the rich and statused Aglionby "Raven Boys," but in this case, finds friendship with four boys any way. While Gansey, Ronan, Adam, and Noah may look rich and spoiled on the outside, they each harbor their own not-so-normal secrets, the biggest of which is that they're looking for a long dead Welsh king, who if found, can grant a wish to the one who finds him.

In this sequel, we have the boys and Blue continuing their search for the ley line and the reason why they haven't been able to find Cabeswater, the location closest to the ley line. This book is also about growth, and each of the characters begins to move toward their larger destiny and the truth of who they truly are.

What's So Great About It?
The hardest part about telling all of you why this book is so amazing is trying to do it without spoiling the best parts of the book (so here we go.) In a nutshell, it has to be the characters, their growth, and their changing interactions with one another. Throughout the first book the reader is baited with this idea that Blue might have to deal with the fact that she could potentially find her true love...and then what? You aren't given a definitive answer on this until this book, and believe me,  the wait is completely worth it. The problem over Blue's true love definitely isn't completed in this book, but you can see the beginnings of something that is really going to be hard for Blue to handle by the end of this series.

Then there's Ronan. Oh, Ronan. I have completely and utterly fallen head over heels for the way Maggie writes her characters and how she makes them seem so unbelievably real, especially when they are so breathtakingly flawed. This is what I've always been a fan of in books, and the broken ones always seem the most interesting to me. Just: Ronan. I wasn't a huge fan of him in the first book, and I'm thinking it was mostly because we didn't get to see much of the book from his perspective. Here there is enough to make any Ronan fan giddy and then some. The secret that Ronan discovers about himself not only changes what he thought he knew about his life, but contributes to the overall weirdness that is happening in general with the books' mythology in a spectacularly amazing way.


Why This Book?
If characters are what draw you deeply into a book, The Dream Thieves is something you need to get on your shelves. Maggie Stiefvater does an amazing job with using description as something that makes you truly feel what the characters are feeling in a way that I haven't encountered in many books, let alone in much YA, and it's this gift of hers that makes her such a fantastic writer and author. The connections that she creates between what she is trying to say and her reader is often times so good that it's painful. I found myself physically moved to stay in the world of her book, and when it was over, felt like I was leaving my own world behind. Perhaps that's a bit extreme of an example, but it's the best way I can describe the way Maggie sets up her worlds. I would HIGHLY recommend this book in a classroom, both middle school and high school. The prose might be a little much for the average 7/8th grader, but high school students will eat this up, especially the boys. There is enough racing and modified cars in this novel to get even a girl like me, who has fascination with muscle cars, squeeing over the detailing.

Pick up this book as soon as it comes out in September. No. Seriously. And if you don't have the first one, GET IT!

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