The Raven Boys, Audio Edition

The Raven Boys, Audio Edition (2012) Maggie Stiefvater narrated by Will Patton

I’d been a loose ends, trying to figure out what I wanted to listen to.

This was it.

I adore this story. And I love it even more remembering that Ronan, who is relatively awful in this book, ends up my favorite character by the end of the series.

Ronan climbed to his feet and they both turned to watch Noah working with the plywood for the ramps. Working with really meant staring at. Noah had his fingers held ten inches apart and he looked through the space between them to the wood below, perplexed. There were no tools in sight.

“What is your plan with these things anyway?” Adam asked.

Ronan smiled his lizard smile. “Ramp. BMW. The goddamn moon.”

This was so like Ronan. His room inside Monmouth was filled with expensive toys, but, like a spoiled child, he ended up playing outside with sticks.

“The trajectory you’re building doesn’t suggest the moon,” Adam replied. “It suggests the end of your suspension.”

And how complex Adam becomes.

Some people envied Ronan’s money. Adam envied his time. To be as rich as Ronan was to be able to go to school and do nothing else, to have luxurious swaths of time in which to study and write papers and sleep.

And Blue.

“This is what you get, Maura, for using your DNA to make a baby,” Calla said.

But mostly Ronan.

From the passenger seat, Ronan began to swear at Adam. It was a long, involved swear, using every forbidden word possible, often in compound-word form. As Adam stared at his lap, penitent, he mused that there was something musical about Ronan when he swore, a careful and loving precision to the way he fit the words together, a black-painted poetry. It was far less hateful sounding than when he didn’t swear.

And the narrator is wonderful here. There are four different teenage boys, and the three women in Blue’s life, plus other characters, and it was always very clear who was speaking. It wasn’t just Adam’s accent making him different, but Roman’s brash growling, and Noah’s soft passivity.

It’s marvelous and wonderful and so well done. I love this book.

Publisher: Scholastic Audio
Rating: 9.5/10

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