The Dream Thieves

Oh, to be wild in the summertime. To eat magic for breakfast and possibility for dessert. To taste immortality at the bottom of a bottle or the tip of a pill. To be seated on top of a roaring engine, to have a bank account like a bottomless pit, to have a well of dreams to build castles for your friends and a prison for yourself.

What it would be, to be a magical teenage boy.

Now that we've set the mood, how about some tunes? Barring actually listening to a symphony of rubber tearing over asphalt, I recommend Kavinsky's OutRun album (preferably “Deadcruiser” or “Testarossa Autodrive,” though Stiefvater slants towards “Blizzard” according to her Tumblr), and we're good to go.

So, Ronan Lynch. This kid's got issues. Still reeling from the horribly violent death of his father and the mandate in the will that's kept him from his childhood home, one of his close friends is a ghost, another made a deal with a magical forest, and the last is revolving around a tenuous future that banks on the location of a centuries dead Welsh King. Meanwhile, Ronan's dreams are becoming reality, many of which are pretty ugly. When he isn't venting his anger through lashing out at his friends and slamming car doors, he's balling his rage into a duel of sexual frustration and combustion engines with Aglionby's resident Buglarian gangster brat, (the aptly named) Joseph Fucking Kavinsky.

Kavinsky and Ronan stalk each other like vultures hungry for each other's meat. Their confusion about themselves becomes a relationship of competition and self-destruction, and even a competition of self-destruction. One second Kavinsky is despicable in Ronan's eyes, the next he's got shoulders as “beautiful as a corpse.” The feeling is clearly mutual. They are two angry lonely boys, but one is much lonelier and angrier than the other, and slowly, with Stiefvater's careful don't-call-it-a-plot-but-I'll-be-damned-if-it-isn't-a-climax pacing, emerges one exhilaratingly obnoxious teenage villain. You don't know whether you want to spit on him, hug him or cheer him on when he throws Molotov cocktails at his own car.

How do you chase death and destruction and be simultaneously convinced that you're invincible? Ronan is realizing his life was nothing but vapor, that he was raised in a house built on dream things, and he keeps falling in love with things that want to eat him. Adam and Gansey are both recognizing the futility of their missions in life, that they may never get what they truly want, but they don't know how to stop. And Blue, the smartest of the bunch, begins to understand that even if her inevitable love story is a tragic one, it's still a love story, one made of magic, wonder and her impossible boys.

Stiefvater has a gift for the impossible, making the intangible feel as real as shit. Her words let you taste the Henrietta air, smoking with magic the way lightning singes the atmosphere. You can feel the ley lines as distinctly as Adam does, you can smell the ammonia in Ronan's dreams. There are freaking psychics running around consulting their tarot cards and turning over stones in people's back yards, while a hit man drives around in a champagne-colored rental car and takes Blue's mother out on a date. Like I said in my Raven Boys review – real and unreal.

I think it should be obvious by now that I absolutely love this book. It's explosive in a way that The Raven Boys wasn't, which suits its primary protagonist, and instead of meandering happily the way the first book did, it barrels forward. Where is it going? Hard to say, this is Stiefvater we're talking about. If you're looking for a refined, organized plot you will never get one from her. She's all about the journey, the ride, fuel burning up in the engine. My advice? Get in the damn car.