The Raven King (The Raven Cycle, #4)

by Maggie Stiefvater

[empressbrooke]

Lately I've been reading books where I think, "Hmmm, they could have made this shorter and not lost anything." But this series finale left me wishing Maggie Stiefvater had gone longer. Everything that happened was excellent, but there were definitely gaps and underdeveloped places where I thought more explanation would have helped. Why exactly did Persephone go between the mirrors and die at the end of book 3? Given that we find out that Glendower has been dead this whole time (which I found really awesome, actually, as well as Noah's circular participation in Gansey's Glendower search), what was up with Gwenyllian and Artemus and the cavern with the bone animals and the mirror lake? What exactly had Artemus been doing since Blue's birth that left him so shaken? Did Orphan Girl serve a plot purpose, or was she just there to demonstrate a softer side of Ronan? Why did Maura and Calla take such an unprecedented backseat to all the other action? Why couldn't Henry Cheng have been introduced one book earlier (both because I sincerely enjoyed him, and because his integration into the group was very sudden)? There's leaving things up to the imagination, and then there's being unintentionally fuzzy - I think this conclusion falls into the latter of the two, and yet this is the first time I've read something since Harry Potter where I knew I was going to reread it someday.

Ultimately, I do think that this ended up being about the characters more than the plot - the end point in their search for Glendower became less important for Gansey and Adam as they became more comfortable with themselves, and in the end they needed Glendower's favor to restore problems they set in motion through their search, rather than to fix problems within themselves. The repetition of "Depending on where you began the story" highlighting each character's journey reminded me of another excellent YA book, Guy Gavriel Kay's Ysabel, which emphasized the theme from his adult books about how each person, no matter how minor a character in the story at hand, is the main character in another story. But after the series emphasized the Glendower/Sleepers plot so heavily, I still would have liked the conclusion to be less fuzzy.