Kelly interviewed Maggie Stiefvater about her Young Adult fantasy novel Lament: The Faerie Queen’s Deception. Be sure to also read Kelly’s review of Lament. Learn more about Ms Stiefvater at her website.
Lament hearkens back to the old faerie legends, which were often tragic and often frightening, and not at all sugar-coated. How did you become interested in faerie lore, especially the darker stuff?
When you write about things like homicidal faeries, you get asked “why faeries?”
Lament: The Faerie Queen’s Deception by Maggie Stiefvater
First love: it’s scary and confusing enough even when there aren’t homicidal faeries involved. Add in the homicidal faeries, and a girl can get in over her head before she can say “cold iron.”
Maggie Stiefvater‘s Lament: The Faerie Queen’s Deception is an excellent YA fantasy that will appeal to anyone who likes stories of the fae as they appear in the oldest legends: dangerous, seductive, and sometimes deadly. Let me say right up front: Lament is downright frightening in places.
Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 4.5 | Maggie Stiefvater | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
“James Antioch Morgan,” the king of the dead said, and when he sang out James’ name, it sounded like music. “You will be called to make a choice. Make the right one.”
James’ eyes glittered in the darkness. “Which is the right one?”
“The one that hurts,” Cernunnos said.
No one walked away unscathed from the events of Lament: The Faerie Queen’s Deception. James bears physical scars, along with a persistent torch for Deirdre, who only sees him as a friend.
Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 5 | Maggie Stiefvater | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Forget everything you thought you knew about werewolves.
Forget the full moon and silver bullets. Maggie Stiefvater’s werewolves are different from any you’ve seen before. After being bitten, a werewolf changes erratically for a while, then settles into a seasonal cycle. Cold weather brings on a change to wolf form; warm weather returns the werewolf to human form. However, this cycle doesn’t last forever. As the years pass, it takes more and more heat to trigger the change back to human, until one year the werewolf remains a wolf forever.
Warning: This review will contain spoilers for the previous book, Shiver. There’s simply no good way to discuss Linger without them.
You could stop with Shiver. You really could. It ends on a tentative note of happiness, and it’s easy to imagine that everything worked out OK after that. Sure, there are a few loose ends: Isabel’s dad is still itching to shoot some wolves, the lycanthropy cure is incredibly dangerous and might have unintended consequences,
Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 4 | Maggie Stiefvater | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater
Blue is the only non-psychic in a large extended family of psychics in Henrietta, Virginia. Her only unusual ability is that her presence amplifies the psychic powers of others around her, but she herself cannot use these abilities. So it’s a shock when, while sitting vigil in a graveyard with her aunt Neeve, Blue sees the spirit of a boy about her age who is destined to die in the next year. She learns that there are only two possible reasons she was able to see him: either he’s her true love,
Kelly Lasiter and Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 4 | Maggie Stiefvater | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater
The second in Maggie Stiefvater‘s THE RAVEN CYCLE, and a direct sequel to The Raven Boys, The Dream Thieves (2013) focuses on the character of Ronan Lynch, a teenage boy who — in the last sentence of the previous book’s final chapter — reveals to his friends that he can pull real objects out of his dreams.
But that’s getting ahead of myself. The gist of this four-part series is that four students of the prestigious Aglionby Academy are on a quest to find the resting place of Welsh king Owen Glendower.
Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 3 | Maggie Stiefvater | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Blue Lily, Lily Blue by Maggie Stiefvater
I’ll admit that the last book in this four-part series, The Dream Thieves, was difficult for me to get through — it wasn’t that I disliked the characters or the storyline, but the pacing was glacially slow and Maggie Stiefvater‘s prose is definitely an acquired taste. However, Blue Lily, Lily Blue (2014) was an improvement; I could tell because after each reading session I was surprised by just how many chapters I’d churned through.
Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 3 | Maggie Stiefvater | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Raven King by Maggie Stiefvater
Here it is, The Raven King (2016), the fourth and final book in Maggie Stiefvater‘s THE RAVEN CYCLE, which began with The Raven Boys and continued with The Dream Thieves and Blue Lily, Lily Blue. And … it’s hard to know what to say. I’ve had mixed feelings throughout all four of the books, liking certain ideas and characters, but often getting a little fed up with the prose and dialogue,
Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 3 | Maggie Stiefvater | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
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