Title: Blue Lily, Lily Blue
Author: Maggie Stiefvater
Release date: March 4th, 2015
Publisher: Scolastic Press
Rating: 4.5/5 stars
Warning: Since this is the third book in The Raven Cycle, there will be (minor) spoilers for the previous books in this review. Don’t read this review if you have not read The Raven Boys and The Dream Thieves (If you have only read the first book then you could check out my review of The Dream Thieves here).
I started reading this book the minute I put The Dream Thieves down (thank God I already had the entire series on my shelf cause the previous book ended with a pretty good cliffhanger).
Summary:
As were used to in this series, this books starts off with a very riddle-like prologue and then continues where the previous book ended. Blue is struggling with the disappearance of her mother and is torn, she doesn’t know whether to be worried about the well being of her mother or be angry with her because she took off without leaving anything but a cryptic note.
I feel like all the books in this series are best enjoyed going into it reasonably blind. So lets just say that I liked the way the overall story progressed in this book.
Characters:
I am not going to be talking about a lot of characters in this review. If you want to know my thoughts on the main five then please take a look at my review of the previous book.
I will however, share my thoughts on a couple of characters that weren’t discussed in the aforementioned review. Starting off with Gray Man I (obviously) didn’t care much for him at the beginning of The Dream Thieves but he has really grown on me. When we were first introduced to him I thought he wasn’t very well developed, he didn’t really have much of a personality. But turns out he is actually a pretty cool guy. I especially enjoyed his interactions Blue! Next up, Colin Greenmantle. I can’t discuss my opinion of him too much because we don’t know a lot about him going into his book. All I have to say is that he really surprised me as a character. I expecting him to be a lot different than he actually was and I kind of hope to see more of him in The Raven King.
Likes:
I mentioned the writing style last time and I am going to mention it again. I just can’t get over how well Maggie Stiefvater writes. The text just flows very well, it’s all very lyrical and beautiful. She has a way of twisting normal sentences into something very enchanting.
Another thing I liked about this book was the unpredictability. Stiefvater manages to throw a lot of plot twists in your face when you least expect it and I love it! A lot of the twists were rather minor to the overall plot of the story but that just made them all the more fun to read.
Quote:
“Don’t tell the others,” Gansey said.
“I’m dead,” Noah replied, “not stupid.”
And another one, because I just can’t seem to pick only one quote:
“It was amazing that she and Ronan didn’t get along better, because they were different brands of the same impossible stuff.”
Dislike:
Again, I already mentioned this in the review of The Dream Thieves, but I was quite confused at some points. I feel like Maggie Stiefvater has a vert clear image of the world she has created but at some points, I just couldn’t paint myself the picture. I am getting better at it as I find out more and more things about the world and I feel like I would probably get a lot more out of it once I reread the books.
The only other thing I didn’t like too much was the fact that we switched characters per chapter. I understand that this builds the anticipation, but for me personally it just slowed the story down a bit.
Final thoughts:
If you’ve gotten this far into the review then you have most likely read the first two books in this series (if that is not the case and you completely ignored my warning at the beginning of this review, then you are a rebel and I appreciate that. Now go read The Raven Boys!) and hopefully liked them. If you enjoyed them then I definitely would recommend Blue Lily, Lily Blue. If you didn’t enjoy the previous books then probably skip this one. Overall I very much enjoyed this installment and I would recommend it.
Lots of Love,
Lotte
Have you read this book (or any of the other Raven Cycle books)? What did you think of them?
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