#mickeyqtl

Rating: 3/5 (can’t decide whether I’d recommend or not)

Liked:

Cover points for the purple and the ace jokes (the tagline is “Alice is about to ace this whole dating thing,” and there are some ace of spades cards on the spine).

The asexual rep. It went past asexuality 101 and got into those nitty-gritty debates over “what kind of attraction is this?” and “if I feel x way am I really ace?”. Most of the book Alice is wondering if she will ever have a romantic relationship that won’t end because she doesn’t want to have sex. Near the end of the book she finally comes out to her love interest and gets to explain how she feels, what she wants, and how they can make a relationship work. Those conversations were very realistic, and I really enjoyed them.

Nice relationships? There were good, healthy, and loving relationships between Alice, her friends, and the love interest - at least they were in theory. The way it was written kind of took away some of that by telling instead of showing, more on that below.

More books about black queer people in YA please! Especially #ownvoices!  Plus, it’s (to my knowledge) the first “issue book” about being asexual, and the main character isn’t white! A “issue book” with intersectionality is rare for the first one of its kind, so this is great to see!

Very realistic depiction of therapy, what it feels like, the way therapists interact with you, and how it can be very nerve-wracking the first session or two. Scenes like this can normalize therapy and encourage young people to give it a try even if they’re nervous to.

Unsure:

The dialogue around money. Alice is in college and her parents are rich, so she doesn’t pay tuition or student loans. However, she works full time to pay her rent during the summer, so she’s the typical “broke college student,” and at a few points she calls herself “poor.” I don’t know, it just stuck out as a little tone-deaf to me. I’m sure real people have this exact money situation in their families, and I don’t want to say that they need to shut up about their struggles, but there was just no other point of view in the discussion. I’d have empathized a lot more if Alice was confronted with the privileges she had, like how her education and upbringing were a result of her parents having money, regardless of how much she’s on her own now. There was even a part where she is about to go into a rant to her therapist about her position in her family as “Not Black Enough to be the Black Sheep of Black Excellence.” I thought this was great and wanted to read more about it, but the chapter cut off right there and the topic was never really revisited. Overall the money thing wasn’t a huge issue, but it did stick out to me as being weird and comes up multiple times.

Didn’t like:

Really the only thing I didn’t like about this book was this thing about the writing that was hard to pin down, but just kind of made the book altogether a bit of a let down. It was partially a bit too much tell and not enough show (in terms of the relationships developing), and partially weird tension, like it didn’t flow the way I was expecting it to. It was the author’s first published novel, and maybe it’s just a case of less practiced writing. Nevertheless, it was my main qualm with the book. It was a good enough story, I just think the execution made it less than.

Also there was a scene with sexual harassment that felt like it didn’t belong. It did nothing for the plot and was not addressed after at all, so it felt like I was just made super uncomfortable for like a page and a half for no reason (and with no tw, of course).

Conclusion:

I liked the ace parts, I wasn’t too into the rest. But it’s a book about the main character being asexual, and it ends hopeful about her relationships! This is all good! I acknowledge that romance isn’t my typical genre (I’m aromantic and I get bored), and I am getting a little bit old for this style of YA (even though I’m not much older than Alice), but overall I just wanted to like it more than I did. If you’re asexual and curious to give it a try, I would recommend you do - it might just be more your taste than mine.

CW:

My Rating: 5/5 (must read!)

Long: This series is phenomenally written and a beautiful experience all the way through.  It’s light and funny, it’s dark and twisted, it’s dreamlike and enchanting. Maggie Stiefvater is a fantastic writer, and if you haven’t read anything of hers this is a great place to start. The Raven Cycle is notoriously hard to pitch, but I think it can be summed up as being about a group of friends finding each other while looking for magic - and being amazed when they find it for real. I’m talking peak found-family right here. Class and socioeconomic division are also huge themes in this series, and are given a good treatment.

I have to point out that this series does an amazing job of making the character who is gay, Ronan Lynch, More Than His Sexuality™. I joke because for ownvoices writers this isn’t usually a problem, but for a mainstream YA writer who is a cishet woman, this is genuniely an accomplishment. Ronan is introduced as a complicated, multi-layered person who has trouble expressing a lot of his emotions, one of them being his sexuality. He is loyal and aggressive and defensive and protective and caring. He feels a lot of things but can’t let anyone know, and he comes across as rude and dismissive as a shield. He’s a very relatable gay teenager. I particularly liked that for a whole book he had a crush on this guy, and even though he never called it that in his POV because he didn’t recognize it as such, it was clearly a crush from the subtle ways he acted. Maggie writes crushes really well, I’ve noticed. Ronan is objectively the most interesting character in this series (objectively in my opinion, lol), and I’m excited for the upcoming trilogy that centers on him and his family.

I do think there could have been more internal discussion in regards to the character who is bi, Adam, and this is what I mean when I say the book doesn’t say the “g” word. It lives in this fuzzy gray space between the ideal fantasy and reality when it comes to real life issues: race and sexuality are never really talked about outright, whereas class is very explicitly discussed. While Adam’s bisexuality is demonstrated in a way that really validates it, and I have no problems with what was on the page, I do wonder about what was left off of the page.

It’s crazy for me to remember that when I initially read the first book I really didn’t like it, but then I missed the characters and picked up the second book, only to fall head over heels in love with it and the series as a whole. I think Stiefvater’s writing style is just idiosyncratic, and so it takes some getting used to. If you’re finding it hard to get through the first book, maybe keep that in mind. Also, while there is one (1) Gay Joke in the first book, the actual gay themes don’t come in until the second one. The Dream Thieves is where it’s at - on its own it’s one of my favorite books of all time. 

If you like history, cars, dream magic, psychic magic, gay crushes, straight crushes, ravens, or Virginia, pick up this series.