Blue Lily, Lily Blue - The Raven King, Maggie Stiefvater
Rating: Great Read Genre: Fantasy, Romance Representation: -Gay? Main character (one of ensemble) -Bi? Main character (one of ensemble) -Korean side character Note: The Raven Cycle is at no point sexually explicit Trigger Warnings: Character death, guns, knives, descriptions of fatal injuries, body horror, wasps
Blue Lily, Lily Blue and The Raven King are the third and fourth books in The Raven Cycle. For my review of the first two books, click here.
As a continuation of The Raven Cycle, I felt that Blue Lily, Lily Blue was a huge success. I liked it better than the previous two books in the series. The main characters only become better articulated with time, and with characters who the reader has known, now, for three books, their interpersonal drama is a big draw. If you are coming to The Raven Cycle for the plot, you won’t really enjoy the books. If you are coming for the long, slow burn of their interpersonal love, anger, and drama, it’s really worth the read.
Friendships develop. Crushes develop. Over the course of the book, characters develop self-knowledge and knowledge of each other, resulting in a level of intimacy between characters that is not easy to come by in literature. Even the background characters have interesting and well developed interpersonal relationships. The relationship between Maura, Calla, and Persephone is lovingly rendered. Even the relationship between the book’s villains is given development that makes them interesting. In fact, everything that happens in Blue Lily, Lily Blue is interesting—even the underdeveloped plot–because of the feelings the characters have for each other.
I don’t particularly mind an underdeveloped plot as long as character is done well enough to carry the story, and I would say that this is the position Blue Lily, Lily Blue is in.
Without giving away too much about the last book in the series, I will say that The Raven King is a satisfactory conclusion to The Raven Cycle. The loose ends that matter are tied, and the characters each find a version of happiness that suits them. Bad things happen, but the main characters make peace with what they are given in life.
As far as the romance goes, I was happy with the outcome. I’m always wary when straight women write queer romances, but I think that The Raven Cycle was handled fairly well. The boys aren’t objectified or sexualized, and in fact their relationship is an excellent foil to the straight romance in the book. Both are equally developed and follow parallel arcs, which is deeply satisfying.
My only complaint with how Stiefvater handles queerness is her reluctance to label it. Her characters never self-identify as gay or bi, which is, frankly put, ridiculous. They never think about themselves as being different, as having a sexuality at all. One of them outs himself and his boyfriend to their friend without any thought at all, as if heteronormativity doesn’t exist in this universe. If this were a fantasy universe and not our own, I would eat this up. But The Raven Cycle does take place in our world (with a few magical tweaks), and so coming to The Raven King as a queer reader, I felt that Stiefvater was being coy with her characters’ sexualities, rather than honest. Queer people think about being queer. We reflect on ourselves as members of the world. We don’t limit our reflections to our attractions to others, but we also reflect on what those attractions mean about ourselves. In an otherwise very introspective book, the unwillingness to examine self when it comes to sexuality was very off-putting.
That said, while I don’t agree with Stiefvater’s coyness toward sexuality, I do think that The Raven Cycle is worth reading. The characters are so much more than avatars for their sexualities (to the point of fault, even), and as a result, The Raven Cycle successfully brings queer characters out of the “LGBT YA” subcategory and into the mainstream. The queer characters in The Raven Cycle are fully realized, fully developed beings apart from their sexualities, and that makes them so much more valuable to a queer reader than the protagonists in “issues” novels, whose identities are overshadowed by sexual discovery, bullying, and outing.
As far as real world issues go, The Raven Cycle concerns itself more with class and the challenges that come with friendships across socioeconomic backgrounds. Growing up poor, Adam and Blue have very different worldviews than Ronan and Gansey, and this leads to conflict and character development that Stiefvater handles well. However, Stiefvater turns a blind eye to the intersection of race and class, making only yet more coy hints towards certain characters being people of color. For example, some—if not all—of the Fox Way psychics are Black, but it is never spoken about outright. Calla, Maura, and Persephone all have statues of Yoruban Orishas, for example, yet not once in four books does Blue consider her existence as racialized. The same is true of Adam, and for Adam it makes even less sense for him to fail to consider himself as a racialized person. His character arc centers on his anxiety over his socioeconomic status, and how he is viewed by others because of it—he doesn’t want to be pitied, and much of his development focuses on overcoming his pride and realizing that not all acts of love from his friends are pity. The reader knows he is a person of color due to context clues, yet in contemplating himself as an outsider at Aglionby, Adam never considers himself as one of the few non-white students at his mostly white private school. He never worries that others are tying his race to his class and writing him off as a symbol of American poverty. Yet this would be so in character for him that it is baffling that Stiefvater shies away from this topic—and, in fact, in shying away from talking about how poverty is racialized, it implies that Adam isn’t actually a person of color and undermines the few context clues that she leaves the reader.
Yet one might be thankful that Stiefvater doesn’t try to talk about race, considering the rather awkward job she does with Henry Cheng. The main characters make fun of his accent behind his back, which is never addressed or rectified. Anti-Asian racism is only addressed in one exchange: Blue tells Henry, “I don’t understand why you keep saying such awful things about Koreans. About yourself,” to which Henry replies, “I will do it before anyone else can. It is the only way to not be angry all of the time.” Stiefvater is clumsy with Henry, and does her readers a disservice by making Adam and Ronan mouthpieces for racism once or twice and never addressing it again. She allows her characters space to mess up and learn when they are classist and misogynist, but with racism there is no character growth, and it makes you wonder why she included it in the books at all, if all it is going to do is alienate her readers.
While I wish that Stiefvater hadn’t been so annoyingly coy about race and had embraced more opportunities for queerness (I mean, Blue Sargent, straight? You’re kidding me), taken as a whole, The Raven Cycle is a refreshing read. The characters have solid, satisfying arcs, the romance is well paced and has a rewarding pay-off, and the plots, while universally underdeveloped, create a sense of urgency that makes it hard to put the books down. I recommend The Raven Cycle to most readers, except for readers that are squeamish about violence—the one thing Stiefvater doesn’t shy away from.
For more from Maggie Stiefvater, here is her Tumblr.
