Blue Lily, Lily Blue

 I've been putting off reading Stiefvater's Blue Lily, Lily Blue until I had time to savor it (also, as a reward for meeting some personal deadlines). And it was lovely and satisfying in a lot of ways--but I don't think I can rave about it like some reviewers have.

In this third book of the Raven Cycle, Blue and the others are coming closer to finding (and waking) the sleepers, including the mystic King Glendower who has driven Gansey's obsessions for the last seven years. Blue's mother, Maura, has disappeared, and her disappearance may or may not be connected with the sleepers. The Gray Man's former employer, Colin Greenmantle, has shown up in town looking for the Greywaren with his wife Piper (a seriously unhinged, self-absorbed beauty). To be honest, while the plot does move forward, it also felt like it moved in some circles. Some threads get resolved here, new mysteries open up. But I don't read these books for the plot--I read for the characters and the complex world and Steifvater's exquisite writing.

What fascinates me the most about these books are the characters: I think I would read just about anything with them in them. I love that they are all fully realized, complex, complicated, and still developing. In this book, we get to see Blue stretch and change in good and painful ways, we see Adam become a little less prickly and more accepting, we see Ronan still wrestling with his nightmares and Gansey--well, Gansey is still Gansey, kingly and imperfect and trying so hard.

And this world Stiefvater has written is so vividly depicted it feels as though you've been there: I come out of her books feeling like I've woken from a particularly real dream. Though this book didn't have quite the same urgency for me as the others, I can't wait to see what Stiefvater does next: it will be lovely, heart-wrenching, and surprising, at the very least.

The Wicked and the Just

J. Anderson Coat's debut novel, The Wicked and the Just, has a lot of elements that I admire in a story: vivid voice, detailed historical setting, castles, a hint of romance. At the same time, however, it tackles a difficult historical period in ways that made me both recoil from the violence but also empathize with characters on both side of the divide.

When the story opens, Cecily is furious with her father for uprooting her from England and moving to Wales where has the chance at a relatively inexpensive holding. But it's so far from everyone and everything Cecily knows and loves, and she's secretly sure they will be murdered in their beds.

Her first encounter with their house servant, Gwenhyfar, is not very reassuring as to the attitudes of the Welsh. If it weren't for the interference of their housekeeper and Cecily's father, Cecily would have the impudent wench out on the streets.

As Cecily struggles to find her place in this new community, she gradually comes to a greater understanding of Gwenhyfar and the Welsh people--but is her new compassion enough to allow her to survive the coming upheaval?

Much as I liked Cecily's voice, Gwenhyfar's is the most striking. Her situation is painfully ironic--after the English conquest ten years earlier, she is now serving in the very house she might once have been mistress of. The English have deprived her of her father--and the strict (and often unjust) laws of the city burghers make it nigh impossible for Gwenhyfar to support her ailing mother and younger brother. She's seen too much pain and starvation among the Welsh to like the English--particularly Cecily.

The story is gorgeously written and the historical research (to my limited perspective) is impressive. It was easy for me to feel that I had been transported to another world. But the prickly relationship between Cecily and Gwenhyfar was hard to read, and the story was often hard to read--not because of any lack of skill on the author's part, but because the deprivations of the Welsh, and then the subsequent violent attacks on the English, were difficult to stomach. Which may, in fact, simply be another tribute to the author's skill.