Cupid Bow Mouth

To be honest, I don't even know what to say about The Raven Boys. What I have learned over time is that not all books are for all people. Books, like many things, resonate differently for different people. That realization makes me more tolerant of readers who either love books that I hate or who hate books that I love. Hey, you just can't win them all. The Raven Boys may not be for you, but it sure as hell was for me.

There are many books in the world written about many things. Some books are written well, some not so much. Some books you swallow whole, desperate to reach the end of the story while at the same time loath for the magic to end. Other stories you might not finish because there's nothing tethering you to the universe caught between the book covers. Maggie Stiefvater's The Raven Boys falls in the former category of each kind of book. The Raven Boys is a gorgeous carrot cake of a novel, dense and meaty and filled with all the good stuff, but also topped with the sweetness of language used very well. It's got a solid foundation in the story and Stiefvater wraps it up in a beautifully unwinding tale of longing and friendship and family. It's savagely wonderful. The characters are incredibly individual and I fell in love with each and every one of them. No one feels like an afterthought (except maybe one and even that was on purpose). This book is sumptuous and wonderful and quirky and everything BREATHES!

It's crazy that I had never heard of this author or this series because now that I've read The Raven Boys, I am hooked well and truly. I wasn't looking for a series, had actually been actively avoiding YA series, when this kept popping up on my Overdrive app (I check out audiobooks from the library for my two hour commute home). I finally caved because there was nothing else that I wanted in particular. It was the best choice I've made since I picked Joe Hill's The Fireman which was so beautifully read by Kate Mulgrew. Actor Will Patton reads The Raven Boys and he is a god! I wonder if I would love the book as much if I had just read the paperback. I don't know. Good thing that I don't have to find out! (I suspect that I would love it just as much.) When I'm done with the entire series, I have every intention of buying these, but until I get through the last it's me and Will trapped in the car. He is amazing and should be winning all kinds of awards. Surely there are awards for voice actors who read books. OMG!!!

Anyway, The Raven Boys is highly recommended. The story unfolds rapidly and no space in the story is wasted. Steifvater gives us a story full of complex, nuanced, fallible characters and it is a beautiful thing to behold. Because these people are damaged and they get things wrong, but they are friends anyway. I like stories like that. I also LOVE that this is not so much a YA love story as it is a story about a group of people who are all in love with each other in one way or another. Steifvater does what many YA don't manage, she gives them all equal time and pays homage to the different KINDS of love that exist in the world. From Blue and her haphazard and unconventional family, the (essentially) three Shakespearean witches, and the boys, these characters are knitted into each other's lives and sewn into each other's skins. There's familial love and motherly love, sisterly love, brotherly love, and romantic love. Everything gets tangled up together and examined from many angles. It takes a gentle pass at classism and poverty, does quite a lot more with issues of self-esteem, self-perception, the nature of families, and abuse.

I love that Blue is a girl who wants to be special, knows that she is not really, and is mostly okay with it. Her falling in with the titular Raven Boys has less to do with her needing them to feel better about herself (a terrible trope in many YA fantasies) and more about her curiosity and desire to have an adventure. She recognizes in them something outside of her comfort zone and she tackles that. Embroiling herself in this THING because, well, why not. She is whole-heartedly complicit in all the shenanigans and I really LOVE that.

I don't know how many ways I can say that I loved this book. There are flaws, I'm sure. Nothing is truly perfect. But to be honest, what didn't work is, for me, severely overshadowed by all that does. Including, Ronan Lynch and his knife edged smile. Ronan, who is very possibly the thing that I love best about this book besides Steifvater's glorious and deft use of language. He is such a character. An exposed nerve, a beating heart, a train wreck of a boy careening wildly and enthusiastically towards catastrophe. I ADORE him. But then so do I love all of the Raven boys, and Blue, and the ladies of 300 Fox Way. This book is so much magic. SO So So much magic!

Swing Time is a story of identity, stereotype, expectation and self-destruction. Smith sets up two biracial girls raised in similar circumstances by very different parents and then follows them from girlhood and into their 30's. They start off mostly on an even playing field, but over the course of the novel, we realize that the parts that they play in their lives are as self-created as anything else and that, in the end, they turn out to be their own worse enemy.

The unnamed narrator, our primary protagonist, is ever in tension with her purported BFF, Tracy. Even when Tracy isn't around, it's like some kind of weird competition. Tracy is obviously the shadow self, the Id and their connection over the years was an oddity to me. This is a book populated with unlikable characters: from the self-reverentially blind protagonist, damaged Tracy, privileged popstar Amy and the protagonist's ambitious and intellectual mother. Everyone in Swing Time is selfish and that made the book a really hard sell for me.
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