Title: The Dream Thieves
The Raven Cycle #2
Author: Maggie Stiefvater
Publish date: September 17th 2013 by Scholastic Press
Source: ARC from BEA
Buy it from: Amazon
Goodreads summary:
Now that the ley lines around Cabeswater have been woken, nothing for Ronan, Gansey, Blue, and Adam will be the same. Ronan, for one, is falling more and more deeply into his dreams, and his dreams are intruding more and more into waking life. Meanwhile, some very sinister people are looking for some of the same pieces of the Cabeswater puzzle that Gansey is after…
Review:
Prepare to feel feels, my friends. I’d be hard-pressed to tell you something that I didn’t enjoy about The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater, but I can certainly pick favorite aspects.
The Dream Thieves was as fascinating as The Raven Boys as the characters and relationships in the series continue to evolve. The characters and their relationships MAKE this series for me.
We see SO MUCH of Ronan in The Dream Thieves and– I’ll confess he wasn’t my favorite in The Raven Boys. I found him interesting, absolutely, but– I just never go for the bad boy, you know? Here, we start to really get him. Learn more about his past. What drives him. There is a core to Ronan that is terrifyingly fragile. It feels like the wrong step could break him. When his dreams start to LITERALLY come true, it is no fairy tale. It’s both terrifying and fascinating.
Said wrong steps are constantly being taken around the forever-angry Adam. There is NO PLEASING Adam. He drove me absolutely insane, determined to always see insult where there was often good intent. Especially when it was delivered by Gansey.
Ahhhh, Gansey. Still a bit obtuse and deliberately heavy-handed in his friends’s lives, but I LOVE Gansey (and his top-siders make me swoon). In some ways, he feels like such an old soul. World-weary. But in others, it’s as though he’s naive to the ways of man. I swooned over Gansey.
And BLUE! I continue to love how gloriously snarky Blue is, but like the others, her snark masks a fragility. Blue is afraid of falling in love– afraid of what it will mean. I spent a lot of time ruminating on that. She’s destined to kill her true love if she kisses him. Feeling responsible for a death would be terrible, but feeling you could have prevented the death of the person you love if you had just STAYED AWAY? The idea is mind-boggling. I love how cautious she is with the boys because of it. It drives me to conflicting feelings because I half want to be like:
But I’m afraid of what will happen if I get what I want.
Oh, oh and Noah? Oh, Noah makes me HURT inside for all that he should have had, stolen away from him.
Maggie Stiefvater’s prose continues to be layered and hypnotic, with dead-on dialogue and humor where it should be. The relationships between all of the characters from Aglionby to those of the psychics Blue lives with are really interesting, with inherent conflicts in those relationships crashing to a head as the hunt along the ley line grows fiercer.
It all adds up to a book that I very thoroughly enjoyed and a series that I can hardly wait for the next book of.
Need a second opinion?
“It’s hard to say what I love best about this book: the lyrical writing, the mythology, or the characters. Actually, it’s not that hard. It’s most DEFINITELY the characters.” –Writer of Wrongs
“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this book since I finished it.” –The Midnight Garden
“As much as I loved this book, it did not WOW me as much as TRB did.” –The Quiet Concert
