It felt like I was just kind of watching a tv show and not really paying attention. This may just have been a weird time in my week. I found it hard to really get into and relate to the characters. Till about halfway through the book I just wasn’t very into the book. But it still seems unlikely.īallad started out a little slow. And Ballad gives me hope that Stiefvater can write books that don’t make me bawl and that Forever will be happy. Its such a reality check when I remember faeries aren’t real. Stiefvater has this was of making the world of her books seem so real and believable. This was a unique way to get another side of the story and to clue in the reader but not the main character. Dee, though not a large character in Ballad, had unsent text messages to James about things happening to her. I loved learning about the bagpipes and was amused with his hand-writing fetish and large vocab. I dubbed it “The Jacob”, in other words the best friend that doesn’t get chosen in the romance department. I loved James especially and his point of view was very interesting. As Nuala grows closer to James she has to make a choice that will irrevocably change her and James’s lives. When a mysterious girl shows up asking for James’s talent he begins to approach a line he hoped to never come across again. As James struggles with his unrequited love for his best friend Dee and being an outcast in a school of outcasts, he must avoid the strange music he hears every night, calling him. ' Ballad is giddy, intoxicating, and threatening all at once.After a summer of hell, filled with faeries, almost death, and an awkward text, James is headed off to Thornking-Ash, a prestigious musical school that also seems to be aware of the strange world of faeries. The book's backdrop, so firmly rooted in Celtic myth, is scary, mysterious, magical, and horrifying.' - Booklist 'Readers of Holly Black's Tithe (2002) or Charles de Lint's The Blue Girl (2004) will enjoy this rich foray into faerie. As Halloween - the day of the dead - draws near, James will have to battle the Faerie Queen and the horned king of the dead to save Nuala's life and his soul. But the rest of the fairies are not as harmless. James has plenty of reasons to fear the faeries, but as he and Nuala collaborate on an achingly beautiful musical composition, James finds his feelings towards Nuala deepening. And it has attracted Nuala, a soul-snatching faerie muse who fosters and then feeds on the creative energies of exceptional humans until they die. James Morgan has an almost unearthly gift for music. Remember us, so sing the dead, lest we remember you.

From the author of the New York Times best-selling novel Shiver

Ballad maggie stiefvater