This is an embarrassing admission to make as someone who writes about books professionally (well, that’s the excuse I make for these stacks around me anyway): My love for Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Boys is so great that I can’t even write a review of it. And when I begin to think of fantasy casting options, my mind goes absolutely blank, because no actors can possibly live up to the characters I’ve made in my mind. I’m not alone in my love — New Line just announced last week that Akiva Goldsman would produce the movie for them. Instead of a standard review here, I’m just going to list a handful of the things that have me seriously crushing on this book:
- The wholly original story about four private school boys searching for the body of the Welsh King Glendower, who legend has it will grant one wish to whoever finds him, and about a girl named Blue who’s the only non-psychic of the family and who knows that one day she’ll cause her true love to die. She also knows to stay away from boys who go to the Aglionby School, nicknamed “raven boys” for the emblems on their V-neck sweaters.
- The very realistic relationship between the boys — rich, Glendower-obsessed Gansey; surly, troubled Ronan; driven, scholarship student Adam; and mysteriously quiet Noah.
- Blue’s endearingly unconventional household of psychic women: mom Maura, famous aunt Neeve, boy-crazy cousin Orla, in-her-own-world Persephone and sharp-tongued Calla. Blue loves them, but she also dreams of escaping and having a “normal” life doing something like “scouring Costa Rica to find out more about the scale-crested pygmy tyrant.”
