Blue Lily, Lily Blue : The Raven Cycle #3 by Maggie Stiefvater - Book Review (No spoilers)

Summary-

"Blue Sargent has found things. For the first time in her life, she has friends she can trust, a group to which she can belong. The Raven Boys have taken her in as one of their own. Their problems have become hers, and her problems have become theirs.

The trick with found things, though, is how easily they can be lost.

Friends can betray.
Mothers can disappear.
Visions can mislead.
Certainties can unravel."

My review-

I was surprised by how much I liked this book. The story was interesting, and I loved the author's writing style. In the first two books, I had been bored in the beginning, but this one was much improved on that front. The plot didn't actually progress much, but something exciting seemed to always be going on. I do realise that this book hardly contributed to the story, but that didn't bother me much and I still enjoyed reading it. 

I liked the descriptions of the caves, but after a point, they felt repetitive. Too many people had been in that cave too many times. Sometimes they saw the place in their dreams, sometimes while scrying and in the end, in reality. Some parts of it felt unnecessary and like filler scenes, but I didn't mind them.

I found the atmosphere of tension slightly missing in this book. The characters talked about how scared they felt in the cave or how some scream startled them, but I did not get that feeling from the descriptions. A lot of this book was spent underground, and I thought Blue and the others would have gotten used to caves by the end.

Colin Greenmantle and Piper were two new characters introduced in this book. Thankfully, Colin had very few chapters, and there were none from Piper's point of view. This book also had fewer of the raven boys hanging around doing nothing, which I liked. In the previous books, the scenes in which Blue just sat at 300 Fox Way, or in which the four of them spent time at Monmouth Manufacturing bored me. The pacing in this book was much nicer, and I hope the author maintains it in the fourth instalment as well.

I am excited to read the last book of this series. I suppose that's the only thing middle books intend to do, which is why I gave this a 5-star rating.