The Raven King (The Raven Cycle #4) by Maggie Stiefvater

"All her life, Blue has been warned that she will cause her true love's death. She doesn't believe in true love and never thought this would be a problem, but as her life becomes caught up in the strange and sinister world of the Raven Boys, she's not so sure anymore."

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“His feelings for Adam were an oil spill; he'd let them overflow and now there wasn't a damn place in the ocean that wouldn't catch fire if he dropped a match.”

― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven King

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*SPOILERS*

Major spoilers, because there's no way for me to talk about the fourth and final book of the Raven Cycle series without them. And for all I complained about the three previous, this one was actually pretty good in my opinion. Things happened! Ronan and Adam kissed! F-ing finally. And I really liked seeing from their perspectives how much they cared for each other. I think that you got some really interesting depth to Ronan's character by the end.

I didn't fully understand why Henry Chang was there. He felt a little shoehorned in at the last minute. He's only been mentioned in passing in the previous books, and then here he took up a lot of space for a character we haven't gotten to know until this book. I didn't dislike his character at all, he added some much-needed diversity to this all-white cast of characters. I just thought it was odd considering how tightknit the group was, to add another character right at the end. I wasn't super surprised by the ending at all. It seemed like after four books singing his praises that she wouldn't permanently kill Gansey. I thought the ending was much happier than I ever expected from this series which made me happy. There's a lot of heaviness and sadness in these books, so it was nice to see that they got something of a happy ending.

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Genre: ya, contemporary, fantasy, lgbtqia+

Representation: gay/queer, bi

Content Warnings: Alcohol, Child abuse (mentioned), Death, Panic attack, Profanity, PTSD, Smoking