Blue Lily, Lily Blue (The Raven Cycle, #3) in What's the Name of That Book???

May 17, 2016 Jessica rated it it was amazing

Shelves: youngadult, new-favorites, fantasy, own

Each book gets better, and crazier, and I love it! And now on to THE RAVEN KING! WOOT!

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Feb 18, 2015 Wealhtheow rated it liked it

Shelves: disabled-character, fantasy, ya, queer-characters, pocmaincharacters

When this series began, all the characters seemed fairly ordinary. Now (view spoiler) And in the background there is always Gansay, gentle and hard by turns, but always supporting them to be their best selves. In earlier books I had favorite characters, ...more

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Sep 18, 2014 Punk rated it really liked it

Shelves: young-adult, fantasy

Blue's mother is lost to Cabeswater; Glendower's out there somewhere; Gansey gets a visitor from across the pond, and Latin Teacher at Aglionby appears to be turning into a Defense Against the Dark Arts type of position.

I love the way Stiefvater writes this series. The language is keen and surprising. The antagonists are charming. The protagonists aren't always so, but that's because they're human. Most of them. Things are often difficult and sometimes they fight, but Blue and Ronan and Gansey a Blue's mother is lost to Cabeswater; Glendower's out there somewhere; Gansey gets a visitor from across the pond, and Latin Teacher at Aglionby appears to be turning into a Defense Against the Dark Arts type of position.

I love the way Stiefvater writes this series. The language is keen and surprising. The antagonists are charming. The protagonists aren't always so, but that's because they're human. Most of them. Things are often difficult and sometimes they fight, but Blue and Ronan and Gansey and Noah and Adam are dedicated to each other, and the friendship and love between them fills me with joy. I don't know what was up with Ronan and his squash one, squash two song—I don't remember it from the previous books—but it's proof that these characters exist even when we're not looking directly at them, and I didn't have to know the story behind it to appreciate how everyone just wanted him to shut the hell up even as Ronan kept on gleefully rickrolling them. And that's part of why these books are so great. Because these friendships feel utterly real, and that connection between the characters provides a solid foundation for the story as it ventures into the unknown.

The plot of this book, however, as it ventures into the unknown, turns out to be more of an idea cloud than the standard conflict mountain we're familiar with, but the character interactions and the writing more than make up for any indecision, and even if I didn't know exactly where we were headed, I was never bored, and we got there eventually.

Four stars. I love this series, and I really enjoyed this book, even if it lacks the intense drive of the others. It won't make sense if you haven't read the previous two in the series, though, so start with The Raven Boys if you like chosen family, houses full of psychics, prep school boys, unresolved sexual tension, girls who have no time for bullshit, and BFFs searching for mystical relics.

Contains: panic attacks, discussions about anxiety/panic; fear of wasps/hornets; ableist language (challenged as offensive); someone asking what service a service animal provides (they're rebuffed); rape joke (challenged); extensive ALL CAPS dialogue; a character confronted by his abusive father; symptoms that suggest PTSD; body horror; what seems to be an "the other Asian" joke from an Asian character; gun violence. ...more

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Feb 27, 2016 Kati rated it really liked it

Shelves: audiobooks, in-english, queer, urban-fantasy, young-adult, bromance, 2016

Finally! I finally felt that the friendship between Gansey and the boys, Ronan and Adam, wasn't a one-way street, because in the previous books all they could do was bitch about him and be rude to him. This book finally turned their friendship into a two-way street, that's why 4 stars. ...more

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Sep 24, 2014 Kate rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: arcs, age-ya, fantasy, 2014

I read this ARC via Netgalley.

Blue's mother is still missing, and the answer lies in a cave somewhere... Meanwhile Adam is learning to channel Cabeswater, and there is a prophecy about three sleepers, one of whom must not be awakened.

Usually if I'm reading a series as it's released I have a hard time remembering the events of the previous books, but that was not the case here. I was put right back into the story. I had also thought this was going to be the final book in the series but then I rem ...more

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Feb 02, 2014 Emma rated it it was amazing

Shelves: owned, from-publisher

Lots and lots of stars and a spoiler free review:

Blue hasn't looked back since taking up the strange quest that has consumed four Raven Boys. Since then Gansey, Adam, Noah, and even Ronan, have amazingly become her best friends. What first seemed like disparate priorities and an absurd alliance has since blossomed into the strongest friendship Blue has ever known.

Their friendship isn't the only thing to have changed since the search started.

Some bonds have strengthened while others have threaten ...more

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Nov 15, 2015 Cait rated it liked it

My feelings:
1. Ugh. Teenage romance.
2. If these lay lines/Glendower/Greywaren are as powerful as it is implied they are; more people would be after them. If they are as unknown and secret as it is implied they are; there are too many people after them.
3. While I was absolutely willing to accept Mr Grey as a character in the last book, Greenmantle and Piper were comically villainous villains and I did not like them, I did not understand their motivations, and they brought nothing to the story. ...more

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Oct 10, 2015 martha rated it really liked it

Shelves: speculative-fiction, audiobook, year-2015

Scarier than the last two. Don't they know I'm listening to this on audiobook in the middle of the night plus am a total wuss?

Big ups to the reader for a killer Piper voice. ...more

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Oct 07, 2014 emily rated it really liked it

Shelves: owned-physical, queers-and-queer-relationships, fantasy-urban-fantasy, 2011-to-2015, family-drama, audiobook, 2020, addictive, magic-witches-occult

ETA 2/6/20 :
Maybe it's because listening on audio forces me to pay attention to everything equally, but I feel so differently about Gansey during this reread. I love him, and I love how his relationships with the other characters are so complex and different. His arguments with Adam in the first two books are so poignant, and the revelation / culmination of the court scene is even more impactful because of it. And him and Blue, agh. How dare they make me care about a hetero couple this way?!

Anyw ETA 2/6/20 :
Maybe it's because listening on audio forces me to pay attention to everything equally, but I feel so differently about Gansey during this reread. I love him, and I love how his relationships with the other characters are so complex and different. His arguments with Adam in the first two books are so poignant, and the revelation / culmination of the court scene is even more impactful because of it. And him and Blue, agh. How dare they make me care about a hetero couple this way?!

Anyway Will Patton is doing a masterful job reading this series, and they're available on Spotify so you should go listen stat.

ORIGINAL REVIEW :

I don't know why I assumed this was going to be a trilogy-- probably because most YA is, these days-- but it's on that assumption that I blame my constant checking of the page count while I was reading, going, "HOW ARE THEY GOING TO FINISH EVERYTHING BY THE END OF THE BOOK??" Of course, it's now apparent that this series is going to have at least one more installment, for which I am very thankful.

I have mixed feelings about this series. On the one hand, there's a lot to love. Blue's wacky family and the number of awesome complex women it contains, the very real sense of place and the vividness of the settings Stiefvater creates, the magic forest, Ronan and Adam and their different magics... but I have always found it hard to give a shit about Gansey. It's not that I don't like him, but liking a character isn't necessarily important, and I have never felt him as a real person the way I feel Ronan and Adam. All he is is the quest, it seems; I know academically that there are other things happening to him in his life, his family, etc, but those things rarely come up in his POV, which makes him feel more like an absent narrator-- he moves along other people's plots, though, which is fine because I'm definitely more interested in what happens to Adam and Ronan than in whether or not they find Glendower.

Blue, I love, but feel like I've got less of a sense of who she is as the books have gone on-- in the beginning I loved the conflict between "hate all raven boys" and her impulse to keep getting to know Gansey & co... but now it feels like anything outside the boys and their quest has dropped off for her. However I like the increased presence of her family of psychics, I love Calla and all the scenes where Blue interacts with her, and that the family is becoming important to the boys too. It's pretty cool that both Ronan and Adam have complicated feelings about their absent fathers, and have now ended up with this houseful of firecracker women guiding/parenting them whether they like it or not.

So, about the book itself, and the plot contained therein. There's a lot that goes on, and without getting too spoilery I think I can say that shit is finally getting real. In the first book there was definitely a sense that these were children getting involved with stuff that was probably going to blow up in their faces; in the second, we saw Ronan and Adam coming into their powers, Blue and Gansey taking on more responsibility, and all four of them feeling more adult. In this one, there's definitely the sense that whatever comes next is going to be hard, but they have at least a chance of meeting it head-on, and it's pretty awesome.

Ronan and Adam are my favorite parts of this. I love them together (and god, I hope they end up together romantically, ugh) I love how they're both broken and don't need each other to pretend to be different. I love when they do magic together; I love that they're Gansey's magicians. The whole bit around Adam's dad's court date was perfect, one of the most heartfelt and lovely sections of the whole book.

The book has pacing issues, certainly, and Stiefvater writes some of her characters with a bit more Joss-like wit and snark than is maybe necessary, but that's okay. (Except Gwenllian-- God, she annoyed the shit out of me.) She also does a really great job of making almost all her characters whole people, random and weird and never one-note-- Jesse Ditley saying he only eats Spaghetti-O's comes to mind, and Malory's description of his anxiety disorder, and everything about Piper Greenmantle-- I always want to know more about everyone.

Things I hope for the last book: I hope Ronan and Adam do a lot more awesome magic, and at least acknowledge the romantic tension building between them. I hope for at least one scene of Mr. Gray and Maura kicking ass together (hopefully Neeve and Piper's asses are the ones getting kicked). I hope for a lot more Calla because she might be my favorite in the whole series. I hope when Gansey inevitably dies that Blue is the one to figure out how to bring him back. And I hope that they don't use the favor to bring Noah back to life.

It may be gauche to be wishing for the next book already when this one only became widely available today, but that's the power of a good series, and whatever its flaws, the Raven Cycle is a good read. ...more

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Sep 27, 2016 Nadine in NY Jones rated it liked it

Shelves: fantasy-and-sci-fi, young-adult, audio, mythopoeic, people-named-neve-niamh-lily-nadine, series-i-don-t-love-but-keep-readin

I enjoyed this, but at the same time I found myself very irritated by it.

I think I might just be OVER the Raven Boys. They are annoying and I don't like them. They feel like two dimensional cut outs that have been spatter painted with "quirks" that I suppose are meant to be charming but instead feel archetypal.

Adam is The Poor One, and tediously bitter about it.
Ronan is a dick.
Noah is Nothing.
Ganzey (who truly is Dick) is a MannySue.
Blue is the Manic Pixie Girl.
Persephone is ... I don't know w ...more

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