The Dream Thieves

This book is really great. I loved how it centered in Ronan, a character thast is very well-built. I found all the 'dream thieves' theme fascinated. I was so compelled by Ronan ability, I just wanted to read more and more. I also liked the annoying character of Kavinsky that keeps getting in the way of Ronan, who is always hungry for his own self-destruction (very much to my suffering). Ronan is a great character. He just has too much anger inside himself, and every single act he does reflects all this anger he has inside of him.
Ronan's gay! God, I couldn't have expected it. I am happy he is okay with it. Kavinsky was clearly his crush, though. Sadly, he died. But he still has Adam, so...

Gansey made me very sad. He sometimes despised where he came from -mainly because of Adam-, and he is sad and desperate to find something more, and no one even stops to think about him because he always seems so happy, it breaks my heart. Gansey is one of the kindest characters I've ever read about. He's very selfless sometimes... I can't believe how much he can feel for Blue and yet ignore it because of Adam -of all people! I also liked Dark Gansey, the one who goes with Ronan to Kavinsky, the sexy and dangerous Gansey that someone like Adam would despise, but someone like me -and hopefully Blue-, would love.

Then Blue, who I absolutely loved once she accepted the fact that Gansey would always be the one. I couldn't have been happier, really. Blue character is so unique and perfect for Gansey, I just can't wait for them to be finally together (not like in that damn part outside the car where they made me suffered so much). I love her relationship with Noah even more now (after their almost intimate moment I think I died -everyone needs a friend like that!).

I can't believe Adam is so oblivious of everyone else's feelings to believe he's the only one suffering (only in one part he seems to realize Gansey has feelings, too). I couldn't believe how posessive he was of Blue, simply because she was 'something' he had got on his own. I really couldn't stand him anymore.

I found the Gray Man an interesting character. At first I didn't really want to know much about him, but as he grew closer to Maura, I got interested.

I liked the ending very much! I can't wait to know more about everyone! All in all, I think this book was very great.

Good, but flawed follow-up to the excellent "The Raven Boys."

I absolutely loved the first book in the series "The Raven Boys, so this one had quite a bit to live up to. Unfortunately, it didn't quite make it. The story is still quite good and held my interest well, and there's a lot of interesting character development along the way, but there were just a number of things about the book that felt off or out of place, and the author used one technique heavily throughout the book that I've always found to be rather annoying.

I think the biggest problem I had overall was that the entire subject this book – the ability to remove things from dreams and bring them into reality – is only connected to the previous book by the very last line of that book, where Ronan reveals that he brought his pet raven out of a dream. This pushes the search for Glendower – the major plot line for the entire series and the motivation for our main characters to have gotten together in the first place – into the background, and a very little progress on that plot is made during this book. Perhaps in the next book a connection between the dream ability and the search for Glendower will be brought into the same circle, but for right now it feels like we just sort of jumped off the track of the original story into a whole new story for reasons that aren't at all clear.

Also, much of the activity in this book keeps the four Raven boys doing things separately, and features a number of fights between them, which destabilizes the core relationship from the first book – and because the boys are all doing things separately, Blue doesn't get invited along as much, so her presence is missing from large swaths of the story.

As for the technique that I found annoying, often times when a writer doesn't want to reveal the identity of a character, they will be introduced and given a kind of "placeholder" name – which is generally based on something descriptive – until the point in the story where revealing their identity will have the greatest impact. I've never cared for it much because too often the reveal is letdown and does not carry the dramatic impact that it seems the author intends.

There are two main causes for that kind of a letdown. The first is because the character is described in enough ways through his actions or tidbits about himself that he drops as he speaking to various characters throughout the book that guessing his identity fairly easy. The second comes about because when the character's identity is finally revealed, he turns out to be someone we've never heard of before nor is he connected to any of our characters in any significant way. In both cases, it ends up making the whole subterfuge of hiding his name feel pointless.

On the plus side – and there certainly is one – we do get a considerable amount of good background information on our main characters, and we get to know Persephone, Calla, and Maura much better. There's a lot of good, tense drama – and, even though the story feels a bit out of place coming out of the first book, it's an interesting and fun to read story. I certainly enjoyed it enough to want to continue with the series, and am hoping that maybe that next book will help connect some of what happened in the first book to what happened in this one more closely.