Noah remains a foil for most of the other characters, and serves to be both adorable and frightening. While they try and figure it out, they each deal with pressing personal issues as usual: Blue tries to figure out the source of her psychic amplifying powers and what her future holds after high school Gansey attempts to decide what he’ll use Glendower’s favor for and strives to hold onto his friends Adam struggles with his own self confidence and the responsibility of being one with Cabeswater thanks to the deal he made with the magical force two books ago, and Ronan continues to deal with the consequences of his dream thieving powers and tries to bring the man who killed his father to toll. The fact that this cave is under Cabeswater, a dreamlike forest along the ley line, makes exploring it and finding Blue’s mom no easy task. The setup is this: after the explosive events of the previous novel The Dream Thieves, our main quintet’s search for Glendower, and the favor he will supposedly grant them, is both interrupted and aided by the disappearance of Blue’s mother down a mysterious hole. Therefore, like Adam, Blue Lily, Lily Blue finds strength in the same thing the rest of the series has up to this point: a quiet, confident humility.

It is a novel and a series that pushes forward with its mysteries and tight plot, but the crux of the enjoyment, and the cause for page-turning zeal, are the provocative conversations and interactions between the characters.

Blue Lily, Lily Blue continues to excel in all of these things, indulging in delicious atmosphere while taking it’s time to give every character and every element its due, and this latest installment even comes with a more refined sense of humor. In addition they sport beautiful prose, and truly satisfying and potent character progression. They carry with them a highly original premise about searching for a wish granting welsh king buried under a ley line of magical energy that runs through Henrietta Virginia. The novels that compose Stiefvater’s Raven Cycle have thus far been quieter, subtler stories. Many teen or young adult novels of the fantasy or sci-fi variety come with their fair share of obvious vampires, werewolves, or angels, obvious romance, and obvious action. Like Gansey, Blue Lily, Lily Blue offers the reader a certain feeling of truth. Now he could see that it wasn’t charity Gansey was offering. For so long, he’d wanted Gansey to see him as his equal, but it was possible that all this time, the only person who needed to see that was Adam. Money for school, money for food, money for rent.

Was it okay? Adam had turned down so many offers of help from Gansey. In Blue Lily, Lily Blue, the third book of the Raven Cycle series, Maggie Stiefvater punctuates the character of Adam’s sacrifice of his pride as such:

Blue lily lily blue book