The Raven Boys

"You're looking for a god...watch for the devil. When there's a god, there's always a legion of devils."

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      For those wanting to better understand the stories, worldviews, and messages shaping today's youth, I offer my latest review in a series of trending books, films, and TV shows effecting a Young Adult audience. My goal is not to critique the art form as much as to analyze how the story reflects and shapes the readers' worldview. There will be spoilers.

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Blue, her mother Marua, and her aunt Neeve  have a strong affinity for the supernatural, an awareness of the darker forces lurking behind the veil, and a pretty keen desire to explore realms best left hidden. As part of her magical heritage, Blue is under something of a curse: if she ever kisses her true love, he will die.

     
Gansey, Ronan, Declan and Adam are the Raven boys, students attending an exclusive prep academy during they day while following legend and magic at night. They are dedicated to finding the ley lines, ancient lines of power strapped into the world. The word is that the ancient Celtic heroes such as Llewellyn and Glendower aren't really dead at all. They are impatiently waiting, preserved in the magic of the lines until someone frees them through the power of reciprocity and sacrifice.
   
This is good news to the one Raven boy who actually is dead already (though nobody else knows). And now that Blue is falling for another one of them, finding the lines really is a matter of life and death.
 
Welcome to Maggie Steifvater's The Raven Boys.

Christians and Halloween

As a child, I was raised in a Mennonite community that did not observe Halloween. From its roots to its current form, we saw nothing compelling or good about it. We gave treats to oddly arrayed children on our doorstep, but we never dressed up, never went out, and did our best not to support the holiday financially or emotionally. I didn't really care; my mom didn't let us kids eat much candy anyway.

As a young adult, I learned more about the holiday from people who had done more than dabble in the occult. Whatever you might think of the legitimacy of their attempts to connect with the dark side, they were pretty serious about what they hoped to accomplish. Halloween was their Christmas and Easter rolled into one. They approached it with a sense of mission and purpose.

I later moved out of that community and for the first time came in contact with a lot of sincere Christians who viewed Halloween as just another holiday. They experienced it as an exercise of imagination, a sort of exorcism of the spirits of fear from which we Christians have been freed. God had not redeemed us so that we would cringe in the face of evil, so they boldly subverted Halloween with a freedom foreign to my upbringing.

These very different experiences have given me plenty to ponder over the years. Though I have more to understand, I have several observations that I hope contain wisdom.