Review: The Dream Thieves

Title: The Dream Thieves
Author: Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Contemporary, Fantasy, Young Adult

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Goodreads Summary:
Now that the ley lines around Cabeswater have been woken, nothing for Ronan, Gansey, Blue, and Adam will be the same.
Ronan, for one, is falling more and more deeply into his dreams, and his dreams are intruding more and more into waking life.
Meanwhile, some very sinister people are looking for some of the same pieces of the Cabeswater puzzle that Gansey is after...

I really love the idea of ancient mythology weaving in with the present day. It just makes daily life a little bit more magical, a little bit more beautiful. There is a poetry to the legends from hundreds if not thousands of years ago, and Maggie Stiefvater weaves that poetry into her books.

The Dream Thieves picks up almost immediately after the epilogue of Raven Boys, with Ronan's little...revelation. Ronan is front and center in this book, and I loved it. You find out more about his family and his past, and secrets.

Secrets play such a huge role in this book. The first few lines from the prologue:

“A secret is a strange thing.
There are three kinds of secrets. One is the sort everyone knows about, the sort you need at least two people for. One to keep it. One to never know. The second is a harder kind of secret: one you keep from yourself. Every day, thousands of confessions are kept from their would-be confessors, none of these people knowing that their never-admitted secrets all boil down to the same three words: I am afraid.
And then there is the third kind of secret, the most hidden kind. A secret no one knows about. Perhaps it was known once, but was taken to the grave. Or maybe it is a useless mystery, arcane and lonely, unfound because no one ever looked for it.
Sometimes, some rare times, a secret stays undiscovered because it is something too big for the mind to hold. It is too strange, too vast, too terrifying to contemplate."

This excerpt does a better job of explaining this book than I ever could. That feeling of unease but also excitement about the unknown? That's this book. The mystery and danger of a secret, and the pain of keeping it? That's this book too.

The characters continue to grow and change and push and pull each other in unexpected ways. Some characters I wanted to punch, others scared me witless, and others I wanted to wrap my arms around in a big bear hug.

This book is lovely.

Read it.