 my little pony friendship is magic and she hates these privileged Raven boys. Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey. She's also kind of hard to explain that I recommend you give up. Hey guys it's Leanna and I'm here today to talk about The Raven Cycle by Maggie Steve Otter. This is a series that I have been a fan of for a long time even though I only just finished it. Not the final book in the story of these characters because there's a spin-off series called The Draymer trilogy which I just started. The Raven Cycle is four books and I have now read those four books. Today I would like to talk about why I love them and help you figure out whether or not you should pick them up because they are not for everyone. So obviously like I said I'm a big fan. I have been a big fan and I have praised these books very often ever since I started reading them. I liked the first book a whole lot. I liked the second one a lot as well. When I finally got around to the third one I enjoyed that as well and the fifth one. The fourth one was a knockout. I loved it. So I didn't feel like I could do a video on the series until I finished it of course. I didn't really want to do standalone reviews because this series very much feels like one story split in four parts by which I mean other series kind of have more distinct arcs within the individual books where you can kind of review it more on an individual basis whereas other series like again like for example the first law trilogy well I have posted standalone reviews for them individually. They really are three parts of one story and of course any series is part of a larger story but I think you know what I mean that it definitely feels more like you can't really split them up. You can't really talk about them or think about them individually. Now certainly I've heard people say they have favorites in a series. I think probably the first and fourth ones are my favorites. It'd be hard to say because again I they kind of bleed together in my mind because they all they don't really I mean an example which we're not reading Harry Potter anymore because she who must not be named is horrible but those books even though they are part of a larger series even though they are part of an ongoing story each book is conclusively like one year of school where there is a villain of the book and you defeat that villain and then you come back next year for more and like overarching plot does continue to develop but you can distinctly say like this book you remember being better than the other one because the big bad of the year was better or whatever. The Raven Cycle I find myself not even really necessarily keeping track of how much time has gone by because they are in school. Maybe I should explain what the Raven Cycle is if you absolutely have no idea and you've never heard of the Raven Cycle. So the Raven Cycle by Maggie Steve Otter it does take place in a school setting. We're following I guess I would say five main characters however it's not limited to only their POVs. We kind of get a bunch of different POVs as needed. It's not exclusively one person story. It's not strictly the POVs of like this group of friends which are the five. It's just kind of random. We get a bunch of different POVs. We predominantly get the friend group but we get others as well and they are in high school but again it doesn't really follow. I mean there's four books so one might be forgiven for assuming that it's going to be freshman year, sophomore year, junior year, senior year but it is absolutely not that. It's just school I guess is happening for these kids but it just doesn't seem to really be an issue. Like you're not getting a lot of like actually I say it takes place in a school setting. It takes place in a town where these these kids do go to a school but you hardly see the school. They allude to the school. The fact of the school plays a big part in their dynamics because it's a privileged prep school called Aglianby Academy and in fact the series gets its name from the school that they attend because the shield or the emblem or the whatever it's called the the logo of the school it has a raven on it and so these boys that attend this prep school are raven boys and the main the female main character blue sergeant she goes to public school she's poor and she hates these privileged raven boys but then she ends up being best friends with four of them but so that's where the series the raven cycle and the first book the raven boys gets its name. So the fact of the school as I said is important to these character dynamics but they really hardly are in school. Like and I don't I mean blue apparently goes to school as well at public school but like you really never see that so it doesn't really feel like school is a really great and convenient way to know the passing of time in books because you're like oh okay well it's this point in the school year or like we moved on to the next school year but since they kind of don't talk about school very much and you don't see them at school very much school is just kind of like amorphously effect in their lives but isn't really a fact in the story. So what is it about if it's not about school which is also kind of hard to explain. So it takes place in henry out of virginia which is a I actually don't know if that's a real place. I think that it is but I actually have no idea virginia is obviously real place. So this is a very rural kind of backwater place and there's like this fancy prep school but like sort of the town around it where blue lives with her mother and her aunts isn't very rich or bougie at all. There's a lot of sort of nature woods it's not very industrialized it's very much like the countryside kind of. What's also special about henryetta is that this is a point where three lay lines converge and so if uh I believe all of the books how may be wrong yeah I think all of the books on the naked cover I don't know if you can see on camera it's pretty bright um but all of the books have like embossed on them the three lay lines because that is central to the story and um on the spines as well where it says the raven cycle you can see the lay lines and arguably oh he's done it at the main character but kind of the main character or at least the character who sort of incites a lot of the action of the story is Richard Gainsey and they just call him Gainsey and he's obsessed with finding this old Welsh king that was supposed to be buried he believes somewhere in henryetta eons ago and that this Welsh king is has magical properties and that when he was buried he's really just kind of sleeping and that he's been following all this sort of like mythology and legend about this Welsh king and the belief is that if you find the Welsh king and you awaken him then he must grant you a favor and so the raven boys these four boys who go to aglainby academy mainly because of Gainsey have been trying to track down their king and so they're mainly doing this because Gainsey wants to do this the other three are just kind of in it with him and then blue ends up being in it with him now blue she herself and her mother and her aunts her mother are psychics and that's what they do for a living as well so they do like terror readings for people they have like a hotline and blue lives in this kind of like chaotic house where it's kind of everybody for themselves all the time they're poor so everything's kind of like broken and shabby and used 10 times she sews her own clothes there's another reason she hates the privileged boys who go to aglainby she works I think at a diner when she's not at school she bicycles everywhere and again it's like chaos at home there's always like tea leaves everywhere and her aunts are incredibly eccentric and blue herself she's not a psychic but she is like an amplifier so she can help her aunts be more psychic by being near or around them or touching them and then as the theories developed anything else that is magical anything else that is supernatural is amplified by blue's presence or by blue encountering it or coming in contact with it so that's blue's deal and then the other sort of setup for this whole situation is that her aunts, blue's aunts, they sort of part of their psychic deal is that there's do they call it the corpse road they basically are able to see souls on this sort of like road to the afterlife but psychically because of the lay lines it's hard to explain and that's mainly explained in the first book in any case they see the souls of the dead of the future dead on the corpse road and so they do see gainsies corpse or gainsies soul on the corpse road and then later when she actually meets gainsie and becomes friends with him she holds this secret that she knows that he's going to die she's seen him his soul on the corpse road keep calling the corpse road i really hope that's what it's called so as you can see like it's hard to explain because there's kind of a lot of pieces going on at the same time and they're all kind of following up their own personal interests and you begin to learn that there's more to all of these characters and their back stories and how they intersect and how their problems and their interests overlap or collide or are in conflict with one another and basically everything becomes very wibbly wobbly timey wimey and bizarre and so basically the vibe and the tone and what you're getting out of this series is these young people who are exploring all kinds of wondrous and unsettling magic so they don't fully understand as they're pursuing the quest uh as they're pursuing their goal of finding the king which is also kind of an amorphous quest it's kind of almost like the white whale so to speak like it's just become like a mission for gainsie where the mission itself is almost more important than actually finding him and yet finding him is also really important and becomes more important as they begin to desperately need a favor and there's like a lot of interpersonal dynamics that become interesting there are of course other people who are also interested in finding this old Welsh king and so that becomes dangerous if other people are out for this as well so there's just kind of a lot going on in these books which is kind of why it's hard for me to identify different arcs with them in the books or to explain it cohesively because there's just a lot going on and so you're just basically following these characters and their messy relationships and the crazy mind-bending magics that they're coming in contact with there's a lot of sort of nature vibes because they are kind of in the backwoods and a lot of the magic is coming from or is connected to this forest that becomes like almost a character in the story called caves water and it's just it's bizarre it is bizarre and Maggie Steve Otter's writing style is also bizarre but it's a bizarre that really works for me so like for example like i just flipped to kind of a random page because Maggie Steve Otter's writing style is kind of the same throughout where like the imagery that she evokes or like the way she goes about describing things or explaining things is unconventional so this is like the very beginning of the first book so it's not spoiler or anything so we're kind of getting to know blue and her aunt so unlike blue who didn't tend toward patience Neve was a regal statue on the old church wall hands folded ankles crossed beneath a long wool skirt blue huddled shorter and thinner was a restless sightless gargoyle it wasn't a night for her ordinary eyes it was a night for seers and psychics witches and mediums that's just kind of like a small taste of what her writing style is like so describing them as statues and gargoyles i mean obviously they aren't their people but it's meant to evoke that imagery and the whole thing just is kind of like that all of the time the way things are described is always kind of in terms of symbols and metaphors and um she uses words to describe things that are absolutely not a description of that thing i think they're in the newest uh or the new trilogy um the dreamers trilogy or the dreamer trilogy whatever it's called there was uh a line that when i was fighting with Jess she was like what does that even mean it was like i love it um and it was something like she had a smile like she had a smile like a nuclear fallout zone or something like that or a smile like a nuclear bomb and like what does a smile what does that mean i mean i like it because while it does absolutely nothing to describe how this person looks it does convey the impression that this person is meant to be leaving you with which i think is a really effective way of describing something rather than telling you that their you know lips are this big or this thin and this color and that they have straight or crooked teeth and that they're smiling so broadly that you can like see their cheeks being pushed up or that their eyes are kind of narrowed and like one person might interpret that as like so i they look constipated or whatever but like by just simply saying that the smile looks like i think it was a nuclear bomb or nuclear explosion i don't know if you get the uh the vibe that leaves you in no doubt of like the kind of impression you are meant to be left by this character and what it means when they smile that it's not something joyous it's not something pleasant it's something alarming i think at 1.2 they say something like that ronan lynch's smile is like a razor i think that might say that a lot which again is not helpful as an actual description like if you're an artist um looking for a description that you can use to sketch them not especially helpful but as a reader i have a very clear clear image of my mind of like what type of person ronan lynch is and ronan lynch is my favorite character so i was very excited that the spinoff series is about ronan lynch ronan lynch is one of the raven boys and uh he's got a chip on his shoulder like none other so her writing style and the type of story that it is is kind of just wild amorphous hard to pin down but if it's your thing then it's gonna be hardcore your thing and it was not your thing it's never going to become your thing so like if you start reading the series and you're like this writing style is bonkers and i what is even happening then i recommend you give up because it's gonna be like that for the whole series i personally love it all those wild descriptions they totally work for me and they really make this series like the evocative vibey just kind of atmospheric more experience than story to me i really feel like the raven cycle is something that i experienced rather than read because i felt like i was in this greenery and surrounded by magic that was inexplicable and that the the magic of friendship is there but not in like a corny way it's not i think that's what bro the my little pony friendship is magic i mean friendship is kind of magic in the raven cycle but it's not all the real magic was that friendly made along i mean no it's it's messy and it's dark it's actually very dark this series which is another reason that i like it because it gets into well death actual death quite a bit so i personally adore this series but again it is not for everyone it's not the kind of series that can be like anyone should pick this up this is for everyone this is so wonderfully written that no one could fail to love it i know a lot of people that don't like it i i understand why it really works for me but it is definitely i'm not even an acquired taste i'm not going to say well keep reading because you'll acquire the taste because i don't think that's true but it's definitely a taste that's not for everyone it's a distinctive flavor it's kind of like marmite you either really love it which i do or it is not your cup of tea and it's not likely to become your cup of tea if you eat it more so the raven cycle should you read it i don't know i think you should give it a try because it is unique if nothing else it is unique i don't think you'll have read anything else but anything like the raven cycle so for that alone give it a go let me know the comments down below if you have given it a go and if that went well or not if what you've heard about it if that aligns with what i said if you have read it if you agree with me about how i described it whatever you want me to know i post videos on saturdays other random times as well but definitely saturdays so like and subscribe and join my patreon if you feel so inclined and i'll see you when i see you bye