40.12: The Raven Boys, by Maggie Stiefvater (2012 hardcover)

I'm impressed with Maggie Stiefvater's range of subjects in her teen novels. She started out with the Wolves of Mercy Falls trilogy (review here) depicting a girl in love with a werewolf, which is pretty standard fare in TeenLit these days. However, after that she released Scorpio Races (This appears to be a book I read over the last year or two but forgot to add to my blog. It was excellent, though!) about a world where fierce horses rise from the waters and sometime kill humans and at other times are captured and trained by humans to compete in a deadly race. In Raven Boys she take a different direction again, entering the world of the paranormal.

Blue is the female protagonist in the book, and her mother and aunts are all psychics. Despite the family legacy, Blue doesn't have psychic abilities herself--but she does intensify the abilities of those nearby her. Since she was born it has been foretold that she will kiss her love and he will die. That's quite the story to enter puberty with, and she's stayed away from boys for the most part--especially those from the fancy prep school in town. Enevitably, though, she is swept up by a group of those boys--raven boys because of the school mascot--in their quest to find the ley lines that mark the burial site of an English knight (oddly buried on the east coast of America) and have their wishes come true.

The story involves fortune telling, ghost sighting, card reading, romance, and murder, and it moves along at a pretty quick clip. Steifvater is an excellent storyteller, and while the romance end of things makes it clear that her target audience is teen girls, the characters and story in this book and Scorpio Races make it interesting for adults as well.