5 Star Book Review: The Raven King (The Raven Cycle, #4)

Author: Maggie Stiefvater

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Edition: Hardcover

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Related Reviews: The Raven Boys - The Dream Thieves - Blue Lily, Lily Blue

Rating: 5 Stars

Words are really hard right now. Have you ever heard that poetry is the right words in the right order? That's what reading this series was for me. And it wasn't just the words- it was the right emotions in the right order and I feel like there was a part of this series, and this novel in particular, that reached into my soul and actually pulled something out of me. And I am very happy because of it.

This review will have SPOILERS FOR THE PREVIOUS NOVELS in this series, but will have no spoilers for this book. I am posting a spoiler filled review, where I discuss things in even more depth, tomorrow.

I can't sum up the plot of this book like I normally do with my reviews for a few reasons. The biggest one being that it is at once to complicated to explain and also to simple to do the story itself justice. From day one this has been a series based more around characters than it has been based around magic forests and sleeping forests. Those are just plot devices used to move characters along their paths. This book fulfills all those character paths in ways that may not please everyone, but will definitely feel realistic and thoroughly planned beforehand, not just after thoughts. You can tell that each storyline was chosen with care and considered deeply before it was placed into the book.

What surprised me the most about this one is that Ronan suddenly became my favorite character. It wasn't that I had disliked him before, or that he replaced a character as a favorite, because up until finishing this book they had all been my favorites at once. But suddenly now Ronan is just my favorite. I don't begin to imagine what magic made this happen because I don't want to tempt it and watch it fall through, because having him exist as a favorite character in my head is something I am very okay with.

One thing that struck me about this book was the "villain". It was a very good villain. Not what I expected at all, but it did it's job very well. Maggie's sparse writing did more for the "scary" bits than anything in depth with every little detail could have done. By brushing through broad strokes during the scary bits an extra level of surrealness was added to the whole story. And many of these surreal scenes were creepy in such an abstract way that it didn't so much feel like things were crawling on my skin as it felt like I was watching something near biblical play out in my mind.

I am being very vague in this review on purpose- sort of. It's a very hard review to write without me just posting a video of myself screaming about how great this book is, which I am not going to do. And I don't want to ruin anything for those who want to read these books. I was spoiled for something in the series (which actually turned out not to be as big a spoiler as the thing I saw made it seem it was, thank goodness!) and while it didn't detract from the experience I was constantly waiting for the thing to happen in this book.

TL;DR? A perfect conclusion to this near-perfect series nails all the emotional points I wanted and didn't know I needed.

On a side note: as soon as I finished reading it I went onto Etsy, Society6, and Redbubble and bought a bunch of Raven Cycle merch because I needed it.