The Raven Boys is a modern fantasy targeted at young adults, which leaves me way out of the target demographic, and yet it still managed to keep me interested from beginning to end. Set in the fictitious town of Henrietta, Virginia the story quickly introduces us to Blue Sargent, a young girl who lives with her psychic mother and her mother's psychic friends. Blue is the only non-seer in her house but she has an innate ability to make psychic phenomena louder so her presence is often coveted by her housemates. For each of the last ten years on St Mark's Eve Blue has accompanied her mother to an abandoned churchyard believed to be located on a ley line where the soon-to-be-dead will walk past. This year Blue accompanies her half-aunt Neeve to the churchyard instead thus allowing her gift of amplification to make it easier for Neeve to see which locals are going to die within the next year. Blue expects it to be just another evening spent out in the cold, as she never sees anything when she goes, but this year turns out to be different...
Living in a house full of psychics has many drawbacks and of course one of them is that you are told things that you might not want to know. In Blue's case she has always been told for as long as she can remember that if she ever kisses her one true love he will die. So when Blue sees a teenage boy on St. Mark'e Eve she has to wonder why and things get more complicated when her half aunt Neeve explains: “There are only two reasons a non-seer would see a spirit on St. Mark’s Eve, either you’re his true love . . . or you killed him.” This is the event that sets things in motion for Blue and the three "raven boys" who will all be brought together by fate in the near future.
Maggie Stiefvater craftily mixes Welch folklore with the paranormal and life in the southeastern United States to kick off the series in an interesting way. So if you are in the mood for something a little different in the fantasy genre you might consider giving this a try. Will Patton does a fine job as the narrator of the audiobook version and he creates the right mood for the material.