CBR18 Bingo: Bird and Steal
Bird – Ronan has a pet raven named Chainsaw.
Steal – Ronan and Kavinsky steal items from the dream world.
The Raven Boys
There were three boys in the doorway, backlit by the evening sun as Neeve had been so many weeks ago. Three sets of shoulders: one square, one built, one wiry.
“Sorry that I’m late,” said the boy in front, with the square shoulders. The scent of mint rolled in with him, just as it had in the churchyard. “Will it be a problem?”
Blue knew that voice.
She reached for the railing of the stairs to keep her balance as President Cell Phone stepped into the hallway.
Oh no. Not him. All this time she’d been wondering how Gansey might die and it turned out she was going to strangle him.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys
Blue Sargent has been told her whole life that she will kill the first person she kisses. Although she doesn’t date, especially not private school “Raven Boys” who attend Aglionby Academy, she would like the option to someday be able to date and kiss someone without committing manslaughter.
When Richard Gansey III (Gansey), Adam, Ronan, and Noah, come into her life, she has no interest in getting involved with their group of entitled rich boys. As she gets to know them, she learns that they are more than they seem. Adam is a scholarship student desperate to escape his hometown and his abusive homelife. Ronan is an open wound, barely staying in school while grieving the sudden death of his parents. Gansey is laser-focused on finding an ancient Welsh king that legends claim was transported to Virginia and magically preserved somewhere along the ley line until someone worthy arrives and brings him back to life. The king will be indebted to the finder and grant them their wish. Noah is the enigmatic glue that keeps the other three together. Blue is the daughter of psychics but has no psychic power. Instead, she offers her energy as she is a supernatural battery able to boost psychic signals during a tarot card reading. This is why she helps her aunt with a ritual on St. Mark’s Eve where the people who will die in the coming year walk the ley line, or corpse road.
This is where she sees Gansey. She can see him because he is either her true love, or that she is the one who kills him.
The graphic novel follows the original novel fairly closely. But to prevent it from being two inches thick, certain pivotal scenes were rewritten or omitted. As a die-hard Raven Cycle fan, I was disappointed that some key character attributes were omitted, such as Adam’s Coca Cola t-shirt, as he is referred to as “Coca Cola” at later points in the story and that shirt has become part of his lore in the ten years since the book came out. Also, the pivotal scene between Gansey and Adam when Adam gets out of the hospital was cut down and rewritten. As a fan, I wish they had found a way to keep some of the original dialogue from the scene in the book as it is a perfect example of Adam and Gansey’s relationship and how they behave toward one another in the next book.
The Dream Thieves
The old Ronan Lynch’s laugh. No, it was better than that one, because this new one had just a hint of darkness beneath it.
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream ThievesThere was no other sound in the world like a car crash.
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves
At the end of The Raven Boys, Ronan confesses that he pulled his pet bird, Chainsaw, out of his dreams. He is a dreamer, meaning he brings things, including living creatures, back from his dreams. Most of his dream objects are whimsical and harmless, but the ones that come from his darkest dreams have one goal in mind: to kill their creator.
This book is about Ronan and it is my favorite book in the series. In it, we learn how Ronan came to be the angry, violent, and self-destructive boy he is. His father was a dreamer, and that is what killed him. He never taught Ronan how to dream, and so now Ronan, his brothers, and now his friends have to learn how to both support Ronan while reining in his masochistic tendencies. To make matters more complicated, Ronan has a rivalry with Aglionby’s other bad boy and secret dreamer, Joseph Kavinsky. When a late night drag race goes wrong, Kavinsky shows Ronan how to fix his screwups by dreaming new, undamaged, and even better items, and pulling them from their shared dream space. The dream space is not bottomless, and the two boys quickly drain all of the magic from the ley line-powered dream object generator, Cabeswater, which is also the magical forest that the gang discovered in book one.
This book is my favorite for many reasons, but primarily because Ronan Lynch is such a complex, tortured, and wholly relatable character. While book one was very Blue and Adam focused, switching the lens to Ronan shows how important the the other members of the “Gang”sey are to who he was before his parents’ death, why he behaves the way he does in the present, and how he wants to be – good, deserving, loyal, forgiven, whole – to the people he loves the most. He is an asshole with a bleeding, broken, tender, and loyal heart. His personal brand is “self-sabotage and bottomless Catholic guilt.” To make his life as boy with supernatural powers even more complicated, he and his family are devout Irish Catholics.
He wants to make the pain go away using whatever means necessary. He wants to know what he is and why he was given this power. He wants to know how to not go to sleep every night in a panic about what horrors he may accidentally bring back. What his friends thought was a suicide attempt at sixteen was the night when one of his dream creatures appeared and almost killed him.
The graphic novel is lovely. There are some small things I wish hadn’t been changed, but I’m so enamored with the story that I can overlook these adjustments for the sake of preserving the feelings of the original novel. I expected to be much more critical of this adaptation. However, while book one is very plot heavy and introduced us to all of the characters, book two focused on Ronan and how he is affected by Gansey, Kavinsky, and, most importantly, Adam.
In summary, I read these books over a 72 hour period and I will probably do a reread soon. However, I don’t recommend starting with the graphic novels. The MacGuffin of a dead Welsh king makes little sense in the original books, and Gansey’s obsession make next to no sense in the graphic novel without the additional pages of character development and backstory. I’m so glad these graphic novels exist, but I will always recommend newcomers to read the first novel before moving onto the graphic novels.
