Join This Fandom: Maggie Stiefvater’s Raven Cycle

Last week, I tried to persuade you to join me in my fangirling for Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch series. This week, allow me to make the case for another series. Just like last week’s, this one is incomplete; just like last week’s, the final volume is scheduled for publication in the upcoming twelve months, so I’m not even drawing you into another purgatory of endless patience.

Maggie Stiefvater’s Raven Cycle is a young adult —

Hold on, skeptics (young adults and not-so-young adults who are OK with YA can skip this aside). I know many of you have been fed ridiculous ideas about YA by media thinkpieces. I know that others have been turned off by popular YA works that focus on things that don’t interest you, such as first-love stories or allegory-rich dystopias. But just as not enjoying Star Trek doesn’t mean you don’t like any science fiction*, disliking Twilight, The Hunger Games, or Divergent doesn’t mean that no YA will float your boat. It’s a really, really broad and exciting genre.

(OK, everyone, PSA over. Back to our regularly scheduled program.)

*ahem*

Maggie Stiefvater’s Raven Cycle is a young adult quartet. The first three volumes, The Raven Boys (2012), The Dream Thieves (2013), and Blue Lily, Lily Blue (2014), are soon to be joined by the final one, The Raven King, this February (2016).

The series follows the adventures of Blue, a working-class girl whose psychic relatives have warned her that her true love will die if she kisses him, and a gaggle of local private-school boys whose leader, Richard Gansey III, is searching for the legendary dead king Glendower.

There are lots and lots of fans of the characters; I like them, too, but they’re not what draws my interest to these books.

I love them for two reasons: first, for the beautiful but practical voice that infuses the series. Second, for the wonderful magical atmosphere. Third —

Okay, three. For three reasons. (I’ll come in again.)

Anyway, the third reason is not as important to me as the other two, but I still like the way the series points out, underscores, shows different ways that people react to financial and social privilege, how it hurts to be on any side of an imbalance. Some characters have all the money they could ever need; others have none. Some characters have happy, fulfilled family lives; others have no one to turn to.

Overall, the story says, problems cultivated at least a lifetime, maybe longer, can’t be fixed by a simple infusion of money or true love or even magic. You get out what you put in, and that means any positive change you make in one area will have an equal, opposite change in another.

This somewhat melancholy theme is made possible by the lyrical prose. Lots of book reviews talk about “lyricism,” but most of them don’t explain how that cashes out into actual reader experience. Let me try.

I consider the Raven Cycle to have lyrical writing because phrases, ideas, sentences are aesthetically satisfying, and sometimes, they’re so beautiful that I notice that at the same time and in the same way I notice the sense of them. The writing mixes and matches imagery and makes connections between thoughts in a way that both resonates with lived experience and grants the reader new eyes on that experience.

But most of all, what I mean by lyrical writing is that the writing does all this without getting in the way of the plot, without drawing attention to itself as craft. The prose is both beautiful and practical, and its cadence gets in my head so that it shapes my thoughts for a little while after I’ve been reading. The voice is distinct enough to convert my brain-voice to its patterns.

Both these previous reasons help achieve the main thing I like about this series: the way it treats magic.

The Raven Cycle’s magic comes from the everyday. It builds in normal-seeming bits and pieces until all of a sudden, the incremental steps that seemed unremarkable culminate into something breathtaking that somehow still falls on the scale of reality that’s been established.

For example, there’s a great reveal of this nature about halfway through the first book, The Raven Boys: something the protagonists and the readers thought was normal, didn’t even ping any “aha! foreshadowing!” sonar, is shown to be world-flipping supernatural. And it’s only when you get to that sudden about-face that you realize it’s not actually sudden or an about-face at all. It was the last riser on a staircase you’ve already been following for the previous hundred pages. You just didn’t realize you were heading up.

This also means that the magic of this story doesn’t have quite the same sort of rules as magic from many other stories. There are reasons that the magic happens the way it does; there are things the protagonists can understand about it. And from what we and they see, we sense there are rules that one could find out, were one so inclined and had one the resources, both psychological and material, to succeed in such an undertaking.

But the rules are like high-level physics: so alien to human intuition that they require methodical analysis to understand, and the processes they describe are so powerful that you may well blow yourself up or find yourself with the magical equivalent of radium poisoning before your study is finished.

Together, the setting, voice, plot, and atmosphere help conjure up a sense of something bigger than the main characters — perhaps bigger than humanity — that is too big for Blue and Gansey to grasp completely but too dangerous to let go of.

In the same way, the stories tease the readers with certainties about the future, both magical and non-magical: Blue will kill her true love. Another character will die by the end of the year. A third’s emotions may never let him be at peace. A fourth might never reach the success he craves because he was born into an abusive, poor family.

We hope these outside forces — magic, trauma, privilege, destiny — won’t hurt the characters we’ve come to care about, but we’ve seen enough of their power to know that the fight against them will be uphill and full of sacrifice.

So join me and the rest of the fandom in waiting to see how it all turns out.

* Of course, you may actually not like any science fiction. That’s an okay taste to have. You might just plain not like the scope/teenage viewpoint that most YA novels share. That’s okay too. Just don’t judge a book by its genre designation, is what I’m saying.