Blue Lily, Lily Blue

You don't see too many quadrilogies these days that were actually planned as such. I think Blue Lily, Lily Blue serves the purpose that typically the second book in a trilogy is saddled with - setting up the climax. It's a little more aimless than [b:The Raven Boys 17675462 The Raven Boys (The Raven Cycle, #1) Maggie Stiefvater https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1415182016s/17675462.jpg 18970934], and definitely not as fuel-injected as [b:The Dream Thieves 17347389 The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2) Maggie Stiefvater https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1418213037s/17347389.jpg 21598446] (probably nothing ever will be, except perhaps that book about a gang of girl street racers Maggie said she was working on bites lip). The major conflicts slip in and out of relevance like passing moments in a dream. Lots of questions are raised, a few are answered. All in all, things just get a lot more magical, and I mean that in a perfectly literal sense.Adam, as usual, is the quiet hero of this book. He develops as a man and as the magician. He comes to accept and appreciate his arrangement with Cabeswater, which has granted him some pretty impressive abilities and connection to the otherworldly. His intelligence and ruthlessness is also on full display here - where Ronan is a more classic kind of brute, all anger and viciousness, but deep down believes in a very hard-lined right and wrong, Adam is more snakelike. When Ronan asks him to come up with idea to rid them of the problem of Greenmantle, his father's murderer, Adam hatches a plan that is both efficient and horrifying. Honestly, if Ronan and Adam's sexual tension (and there was plenty of it, lemme tell ya) does come to the appropriate conclusion, those two will be a force to be reckoned with. Speaking of Colin Greenmantle, though, he and his wife Piper may have been this book's highlight. Far from a distant chin-stroking stereotypical villain, Greenmantle is an unsettlingly energetic sociopath. Think Dandy from American Horror Story: Freak Show, but funnier, more self-aware and paired up with a woman just as bad - if not worse - than him. They are both ten thousand pounds of snark and wit piled into two deliciously superficial people, whose greatest fear is to be inconvenienced. They're like raving toddlers with guns and money, with a fixation on magical artifacts, not realizing that there are much bigger things going on than what they're going add next to their collection.And Gansey excels in unexpected ways as well. I never really thought about it before, but I'm realizing that Gansey is kind objectified by the narrative of these books. Every one of his friends is defined by him in a way, and as such defines him in a certain way. Whether they're attracted to him, in love with him, admire him or resent him, a big part of this story is what Richard Gansey III is to other people, but very rarely is it about what he is to himself. We learn that his obsession with Glendower is not just some eccentric rich boy hobby, it has a much greater significance and so does Gansey himself. As always, Maggie's writing is beautiful. Her prose is sticky, it creates images in your head that are so vibrant and evocative. There are a lot of spooky moments, curses and ghosts that act like good old fashioned versions of curses and ghosts. I would say that this is not as good as the previous two books, but that doesn't mean its subpar in any way. This is Stiefvater we're talking about, she has not let me down yet.