7.09.2018

Books: The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater

This is the second in the Raven Cycle series. I liked it, but not as much as I did The Raven Boys. I'm not sure why, though I could make educated guesses. For one, I do really enjoy the character of Ronan, but I think he's the type who is more interesting in smaller doses. After a while, he gets a little monotonous. I mean, he's still cool, but he doesn't have a lot of character development. At least not in this book.

Adam has a somewhat interesting arc here, but I wanted a little more. It still felt like skimming the surface with him while we delved a bit with Ronan.

Kavinsky is an asshole with exactly one joke that he tells over and over. We get it; Ronan is [probably] gay. ::shrug:: Being beat over the head with it is not very entertaining.

And we all saw where the Gansey/Blue thing was headed. So no surprises there.

Then the whole hit man subplot . . . Sigh.

Also, this book had places that I could see needed more editing. The first one did too, but this one more so. Which makes me feel like these books were rushed into production.

All that aside, these books—the ones I've read, anyway—are still some of the best I've read in a while. It took me longer to get into TDT, but once I was about 40% in, I couldn't put it down. (For reference, I was hooked on TRB from the start.) Every series has stronger and weaker books, and so long as you don't lose your readers by being hugely inconsistent, you're good. And these books are pretty consistent. That is to say, even "weak" ones are strong relative to a lot of the market. So I'll certainly continue with the series, and I'd definitely recommend them.

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