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. These are not your fluffy, sparkly faeries. Getting mixed up with them can mean stark terror and heartbreaking choices.

The heroine, Deirdre, is one of Lament's treasures. She is sought after by the Fair Folk because of her uncanny musical and psychic tal... Read More

Ballad by Maggie Stiefvater
"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. Dee, meanwhile, is pining for Luke and spiraling into depression. James and Dee think the faerie folk are through with them, but when they begin classes at Thornking-Ash, a residential fine-arts high school, trouble follows them there.

James finds himself tangled up with the faery Nuala. Nuala is a leanan sidhe, a type of faerie that inspires men to ar... Read More

Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

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.

Our heroine, Grace, was attacked by wolves as a child. Just before she was about to become lunch, one of the wolves intervened and saved her. Ever since, Grace has watched for "her" wolf in the woods each winter. And every summer, a golden-eyed boy named Sam watches Grace from afar, too shy to approach her. Then, when one of Grace's high sch... Read More

Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

The probable Hollywood pitch for Shiver is "Twilight with werewolves," and there are some obvious parallels. Human girl and "monster" boy. Romance. Sense of doomed love. Teens. But Shiver is a notch or two above Twilight, though Twilight was to my mind atrociously written, so that isn't saying a lot. And Shiver does have some major flaws. But despite the flaws and the sometimes-overwrought writing, it also features some good writing and decent characterization.

The general premise is that Maggie Stiefvater’s werewolves change with the cold, though as they get older the change comes sooner and lasts longer until they're permanently wolf. The book is set in Minnesot... Read More

Linger by Maggie Stiefvater

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, and Grace and Sam have developed a relationship that they're still considered too young to have. But you could turn the last page of Shiver and be satisfied, and hopeful for Grace and Sam's future.

In Linger, Maggie Stiefvater takes all those loose ends and unravels them further. This is a d... Read More

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, or she’s going to kill him.

The Raven Boys follows two groups of characters whose stories weave together: Blue and her eccentric family, and a clique of four boys from the posh Aglionby Academy, whose students are nicknamed “raven boys” for the emblem on their uniforms. The leader of this clique is Gansey, the boy whose fetch Blue saw in the cemetery; he is searching fo... Read More

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?" a lot. And once I valiantly fight back the urge to answer, "Why not?," I realized that I don't really remember when my ...