Just throwing this out there right off the bat… this review is gonna have spoilers in it. They will be unavoidable, and the entire review is going to assume that you have also read this book, because I need a safe space to discuss the ending and what that means retroactively about the series and for my feelings in general. If you’re looking for a general sense of how much I recommend this book, I point you toward my four star rating and encourage you to start from the beginning at The Raven Boys.
SPOILERS
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So, I just put down The Raven King, and I have some lingering questions. Unassailably, this is the series ending the fans wanted. No one dies — at least not permanently — and two ships get their HEA (or HFN). Lingering questions were answered. Antagonists were quickly dispatched. There is still magic in the world.
I wonder if Game of Thrones, or some other relentlessly dreary saga, hasn’t ruined happy endings for me. All of the bleakness in storytelling that is so very in vogue right now kind of has my back up about the simple, cathartic pleasure of things going right for characters, to the extent that when it actually happens, after having my shoulders around my ears for so long wondering if Stiefvater actually has the ovaries to KILL kill Gansey, catharsis becomes anti-climactic. Oh, they’re… happy? Things worked out? That’s… that’s it?
Because, really, it was kind of easy. The idea — to bargain for Gansey’s life with Cabeswater, asking the forest to give up its own gifted-into-existence spirit for Gansey’s soul — is somewhat obvious in retrospect. (Not nearly as obvious as just having Gansey ask the air in his Authoritative Voice, as he had done so many times previously, to show him where Glendower is.) And, for a second, it looked like that wasn’t going to work, like Gansey was really gone or like they’d have to come up with something else. But then, it just kind of did work? I’d really love some clarification on this, because there is a whole chapter that basically says,
“Cabeswater, can you sacrifice the forest so that Gansey can live?”
“Okay.”
In a bit more detail: “It is impossible for Cabeswater, a thing that exists in the infinite, to simply die so that a mortal life can be restored. Also, that body is dead, so Cabeswater would have to make something new. But, through the power of images in Ronan’s mind and also Blue being part tree spirit, Cabeswater will create a human soul that is basically identically Gansey and put it back in his body anyway, at the cost of the trees in the forest.”
What I’m saying is, I think Stiefvater’s prose does a lot of heavy lifting here in making this section seem very dramatic and poignant, when in fact it’s Cabeswater the forest just going ahead and doing the very thing it said it couldn’t do to resurrect Gansey after making only perfunctory skeptical noises.
It’s not like I wanted Gansey to die. The trick about telling you that he is going to die at the beginning of your four book series is that you’re pulling the rug out from under your readers at the get-go. They don’t know who this guy is, but they know he’s going to be important and that they probably will be invested in his life. Forecasting his death sweeps away the tacit assumption that he is going to live unless the author is going for a *shocking moment*, so to a reader, it seems equally likely that the author will stick to his/her word and kill that character as it does that the author will find a way to prevent or cheat that death. The problem is, if you go with the expectation that he will in fact live (as I did,) you’re now waiting for a truly spectacular turn of circumstances that will grant that, something almost as surprising as an unexpected death. And when the answer to that prayer is, “Gee, why don’t we ask the magic forest from whom we’ve already been granted a bunch of favors,” well, am I wrong to feel a little underwhelmed? Call me cynical, it’s cool, this is just a bunch of immediate-impressions word vomit.
For all my griping, can I truly deny that this was a satisfying series-end to one of the better-written and more imaginative YA series in recent memory? No, I cannot. Furthermore, for all of my multitude of conflicting feelings from the final chapters, I enjoyed this book as I had all of its predecessors, with a sense of wonder, involvement, and deep attachment to the characters with concern for their well-being. Stiefvater has a gift of writing people where the depth of their character and singular voice leaps off the page without spelling it out with facile exposition, like “Blue was angry and so channeled her rage into growing ever more deadly through her exceptional talent at krav maga.” Her language lives in the spaces between words and in the shifts of the face before their final resting expressions. That attention to detail and subtlety is what paints the clearest pictures and makes you feel that you really see and know these people, and that’s why, for all my complaining, I am happy that Gansey didn’t have to die.