Anything Maggie Stiefvater writes is immediately picked up in my library. So when her newest, The Raven Boys, arrived, my clerk and I snatched it up to take home, as is our inalienable right being purveyors of reading material. I read excitedly, turning page after page wondering if the next chapter would be a good stopping point. I met Blue, a strangely named girl with a stranger all-female psychic family. I liked that she was determined never to fall in love because of the prediction that she'd kill her true love with a kiss, or somesuch nonsense. The setting was beautiful. I've been to Virginia and agree that it is a breathtaking place. (Although I always feel that Stiefvater has set her book somewhere in Europe until I discover otherwise.) I loved the sections from the boys' perspectives. Each boy was a gift to the story, a character to be unwrapped just a little at a time. Earnest Gansey. Careful Adam. Angry Ronan, with his baby raven Chainsaw. Quiet Noah. And Blue became one of them, ignoring her mother's demand to stay away from those boys like a good little teenage protagonist. She became one of the boys in their wild search for a dead king. It was all building up to a pretty exciting climax. And it kept building. And then it ended. Pretty abruptly, like that. And the loose ends - the unanswered questions, the visions that had not yet come to pass- what of them? Lord and Maggie only know. Leaving the poor reader hanging, for untold months, until the second book comes out. It's criminal.
