Title: Blue Lily, Lily Blue (The Raven Cycle #3)
Author: Maggie Stiefvater
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Release Date: October 21st, 2014
Standalone/Series: Third book in The Raven Cycle
Genre: Young Adult – Fantasy – Paranormal
Goodreads link
My rating in stars: 5 stars
My rating in words: New all-time favorite
What it’s about:
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.
My thoughts:
“Blue was perfectly aware that it was possible to have a friendship that wasn’t all-encompassing, that wasn’t blinding, deafening, maddening, quickening. It was just that now that she’d had this kind, she didn’t want the other.”
Oh my, these books might actually be the end of me. How could I ever move on from these characters? I’m not ready for book 4 – I’m not ready for my time with them to end. Every other character I meet after them will just… not be enough.
As this is the third book in the series, I’m not sure how much I can say without spoilers. Everything I said in my review of The Dream Thieves is still very relevant to Blue Lily, Lily Blue:
–The writing is still as gorgeous as ever. It feels a bit like Cabeswater itself – once you start reading, time just doesn’t apply anymore. You go in at some place and time, but you can’t be sure when and where you may emerge. It’s just that beautiful
–These characters are my babies. Like I said, I love them all so, so much and I both want to devour book 4 now and take my sweet, sweet time with it because I never want this to end. I feel like Blue Lily, Lily Blue focused more on Blue again, and also on Adam. And the character development is yet again out of this world amazing. I just want to publicly state my love for Adam. Yes, I love them all equally and it’s impossible to choose favorites, but I feel like Adam deserves some more love.
– The friendships. The family. Aww man. I just want to cry because it’s all so perfect and beautiful and I want this and I don’t care if I look like a crazy person.
–The romance will break my heart. Actually, there is very little romance in this book in the form of dates or kissing, but I feel like the romance is just woven into every single sentence so subtly and so beautifully. It’s over the entire book without you even noticing except for this warm feeling on your heart. Also, so MANY Pynch scenes! That said, I’m shallow and I do hope we get some actual romance and kissing in book 4. Except for, you know, doomed kisses that will actually kill someone. So not looking forward to that heartache.
–I loved meeting the new characters. The Greenmantles were such fun and original villains and I was never really sure whether to find them hilarious or scary. And Jesse Dittley was just such a sweetheart that I couldn’t help but fall in love with him as well.
Overall, Blue Lily, Lily Blue was just an amazing continuation of The Dream Thieves. I read them back to back, so in my mind they kind of feel like one book though. Both are equally amazing. I love the plot, I love the atmosphere, I love the pacing. But more than all that, I just love these characters and their friendship most of all.
Favorite quotes:
“I know when I’m awake and when I’m asleep,” Ronan Lynch said.
Adam Parrish, curled over himself in a pair of battered, greasy coveralls, asked, “Do you?”
“Maybe I dreamt you,” he said.
“Thanks for the straight teeth, then,” Adam replied.”
“Humans were so circular; they lived the same slow cycles of joy and misery over and over, never learning. Every lesson in the universe had to be taught billions of times, and it never stuck.
Maybe it was good that the world forgot every lesson, every good and bad memory, every triumph and failure, all of it dying with each generation. Perhaps this cultural amnesia spared them all. Perhaps if they remembered everything, hope would die instead.”
“As they moved through the old barn, Adam felt Ronan’s eyes glance off him and away, his disinterest practiced but incomplete. Adam wondered if anyone else noticed. Part of him wished they did and immediately felt bad, because it was vanity, really:
See, Adam Parrish is wantable, worthy of a crush, not just by anyone, someone like Ronan, who could want Gansey or anyone else and chose Adam for his hungry eyes.”
“There is no good word for the opposite of lonesome.
One might be tempted to suggest togetherness or contentment , but the fact that these two other words bear definitions unrelated to each other perfectly displays why lonesome cannot be properly mirrored. It does not mean solitude, nor alone, nor lonely, although lonesome can contain all of those words in itself.
Lonesome means a state of being apart. Of being other. Alone-some.”
“Adam finally sat down on one of the pews. Laying his cheek against the smooth back of it, he looked at Ronan. Strangely enough, Ronan belonged here, too, just as he had at the Barns. This noisy, lush religion had created him just as much as his father’s world of dreams; it seemed impossible for all of Ronan to exist in one person. Adam was beginning to realize that he hadn’t known Ronan at all. Or rather, he had known part of him and assumed it was all of him.
The scent of Cabeswater, all trees after rain, drifted past Adam, and he realized that while he’d been looking at Ronan, Ronan had been looking at him.”
“It kills Dittleys and does terrible things to my friend.”
“YOUR DEAD FRIEND.”
“That’s not his fault. Why didn’t you say you could see him?”
“I DIDN’T SAY I COULD SEE YOU, EITHER.”
“But I’m not dead.”
“BUT YOU ARE PRETTY SHORT.”
“What do we do now?” Gansey asked.
From the other room, Calla bellowed, “GO BUY US PIZZA. WITH EXTRA CHEESE, RICHIE RICH.”
Blue said, “I think she’s starting to like you.”
“There was something unfamiliar about him. Something ferocious about his eyes, some sort of bite in his faint smile. Something altogether hectic and unsettled. She stood on the ledge of his smile and looked over the edge.”