Tanya Lisle

Tag: dream theives

  • Blue Lily, Lily Blue Review

    Oh hey, the plot kicked back in! They’re actively doing things to find Glendower again, which is the main thrust of the series! Find the old dead Welsh king and then… something. Have a wish granted, gain is favour, I’m still not actually sure what they think is going to happen or why it will happen when they find the tomb.

    This book tries very hard to give Blue an arc outside of being in love with Gansey and it doesn’t quite land for me. It’s a lot of things happening to her to try and give her other things to do. Her mother is missing and it is something that she has to deal with. It could have been an arc but it kept feeling more like something she was reacting to than something she was part of. 

    And they gave Gansey a magic which no. He was going to be the one non-powered character bringing them together in the quest by his personality and his drive to do all this, but giving him the power to command things as an actual power tosses that out. 

    Adam and Ronan are fine. Adam is still a dick and being portrayed as not a dick. Ronan realizes he likes Adam in this book but, as he’s a male character, he had his character arc established outside of this relationship and he gets to have his own story that isn’t dependent on the love story and guys I do not care about Blue anymore and it makes me sad. 

    So let’s talk a little about the plot and structure of the series as a whole. Each of these books could conceivably be about a single character’s arc and how other people interact with that arc to further their own larger narrative. The first being Adam, second Ronan, this one Blue, and fourth will be about Gansey. Of those four book, only one has not been about the hunt for Glendower, which makes the beats of the series a little weird. 

    If there had been one more book in the series, I think the pacing might have been better. As it is, Blue Lily, Lily Blue feels like it was trying to cram in a lot of setup for the climax.1 There were new things introduced, including characters, that don’t really get much time to land properly. Like Henry Cheng and the “Vancouver crowd” which I will go on about in the next book.2

    Unfortunately, the pattern of Glendower, something else, Glendower, something else, Glendower couldn’t be maintained because it is only four books. If Noah were a more prominent character instead of being relegated to having as much screentime as an animal sidekick, it could have been a bit better paced as a series, but ultimately this is what we get. Which is fine. I liked it a lot more the first time around, though. 

    Get Blue Lily, Lily Blue on Amazon

    1. And I remember the climax feeling very cluttered, so that doesn’t help [↩]
    2. I am Asian. I am from Vancouver. I have thoughts. [↩]

  • Dream Thieves Review

    Dream Thieves is the second book in the Raven Cycle and I can see why Aiden1 likes it so much. It’s all about Ronan, and it’s also a book where the plot and the characters feel like they are actually connected to one another in a substantial way. Mostly because this is a book where Ronan is the plot.

    Which means I actually have something to talk about other than structure.

    Ronan develops into an interesting character in this one, not only because he has developed magic powers. He gains some depth in the form of his backstory, in the form of how he deals with stress, in the form of how he deals with success. We see what he cares about and what he doesn’t care about. And all of that builds him into a wonderful character that I was happy to follow through the majority of the book, even if he has a questionable choice in crushes.

    Weird thing is that I liked Adam a lot more the first time I read this series. Adam played a much larger role in the first book, with his quest out of his abusive home life, but this book left me realizing that he’s a dick. Yes, growing up around abuse makes people process the world differently and he may not be able to relate to people in typical ways, I know. But there’s a constant sense that he sees himself as lesser than the people around him and that makes him better than them that permeates through his perspective. Not to mention that scene between him and Blue, which plays out all too familiarly to any female who had male friends who expected that their friendships meant more than they did.

    This is also where I really notice that Blue is the only female voice in the story, really. There’s mention of her being a raging feminist that is only forgivable because they are teenagers and eye rolling in pretty much any other context. There are things that happen to her where I really feel that lack of female peers around her because there were conversations that really should have happened that never happen. Does she really have no one to talk to about boys? Not one? Hell, not even her mother or cousin or one of the other women in the house who could have pointed out any of these things to? At the very least to talk to about what happened with Adam? Or anything else?

    The love story kicks in and I do not care you guys. Romance is not my thing. I always feel bad when I stop caring about female characters, but their plots always seem to devolve into something related to romance and Blue is no different. In the first book, she was sort of seeing Adam, but in this book she falls in love and the prophecy that she’ll kiss her true love and he’ll die develops a firm target. Gansey, who we knew would be her true love in the first book, is now someone she has fallen for. And just… I stopped caring about both of them in an instant.

    Gansey, though. Let’s have a moment to talk about why he’s so hard for me to sink into despite him still having another plot around him. I don’t know why he wants to find Glendower. He has a lot of reasons. He thinks he’s not dead because of the grace of Glendower. He has an intellectual curiosity about him. He’s got a weird obsession. It’s about the pursuit of him more than what the end goal is, and when there’s no real end goal, I have a lot of trouble hooking into the character’s motivations.

    However, this book is in large part about Ronan. And Ronan is fantastic. I know I’m being a little harsh about the rest of the characters, but it overall is a pretty entertaining read.

    Check it out on Amazon

    1. The person who originally got me to read the series [↩]