Me on Blue Lily, Lily Blue

Title: Blue Lily, Lily Blue
Author: Maggie Stiefvater
Release Date: October 21, 2014
Publisher: Scholastic Press

There is danger in dreaming. But there is even more danger in waking up. Blue Sargent has found things. For the first time in her life, she has friends she can trust, a group to which she can belong. The Raven Boys have taken her in as one of their own. Their problems have become hers, and her problems have become theirs. The trick with found things though, is how easily they can be lost. Friends can betray. Mothers can disappear. Visions can mislead. Certainties can unravel.

Blue Lily, Lily Blue is haunting and powerful, a far more heavy and melancholy book than I had anticipated. A return to Henrietta, Virginia, yes. A return to Blue and her raven boys, to their search for a dead Welsh king hidden along the ley lines, yes. A return to a place where the real world and ghosts and psychics combine and make the world a far stranger place, yes. But not at all what I had expected.

In some ways, in good ways and bad ways and sad ways, this is Blue's story. She's always felt like her raven boys pulled her into their world, their search. But the truth is that all they did was turn on the light hanging over Blue's world when all that was lighting it before was a candle. All they did was show her that there was far more going on right under her nose at 300 Fox Way that she ever would've imagined. Which is so Blue. A girl who sees herself as the white sheep in a family of black sheep. A battery in a house full of psychics.

Everyone, everything, is changing. And not necessarily in a good way. They're all thinking about what the future holds, or what it doesn't. College, family, romance, escape, dead Welsh kings. Life. The only one who doesn't think about change is Noah, already dead. He changes in little ways, in frightening ways, but he's always the same Noah. Blue is no longer the same Blue. The same can be said of Gansey, Adam, and Ronan.

A somber tone trickles and winds its way through the pages of this book. Their mortality is so obvious now. They all seem so fragile, ready to break the second someone tips them over. But things are getting darker, more dangerous. They're getting closer. The Raven Boys is discovery, full of possibilities. The Dream Thieves is adrenaline and mistakes and dreams, it's harsh and explosive. Here, they're staring to think about the future and what it might hold.

This is the step before the last. This is one more step before jumping off a cliff. They're getting close, so close I can feel it skitter up and down my spine. What's to come, what will come and what won't, both frightens and excited me. I will never want my hours, my days, my weeks and months and years, in this world to come to an end.

(I purchased a copy of this book.)