Hngh. This book's difficult. I'm not even sure I rated it correctly. I've been in a massive reading slump lately, and I've been seriously flagging with my reading challenge, which is disappointing, since I was smashing it for the first half of the year. Until about May, I was never less than 3 books ahead. Now I'm three books behind and bricking it. I thought this book might pull me from my funk, but it was a bust. 
 This book was a pretty quick, easy read, and the best thing about it is the narrative voice; I loved Liv's character, loved her narration, loved her careful balance between dry and joyful. I usually hate this "woe is me, I have too much money and too many opportunities" narrative trend in a lot of YA, but Gier strikes a nice balance between Liv's hermitic loneliness and her easygoing nature. I related to it, which is saying quite a lot. It's also been brilliantly translated from its original German, which helps. 
 The problem is that this book just didn't make sense; it was like an acid trip, and not in a good way. Not in a pleasantly disorienting way. In a way that made me wonder if my copy was missing pages. It's not really about Liv instantly becoming friends with these Londoner Raven Boys, which is unlikely but not impossible - I did a two-day intensive TEFL course in Glasgow a few weeks ago, and after about an hour in a class of 15 students, we were all soul mates. I mean it. We'd have taken a bullet for each other. When I was querying my manuscript, I had an agent tell me that it was weird that the protagonist makes such fast friends when she moves to a new city, but I swear to god, meet the right people in the right setting and you really can experience the gush of instalove. Sometimes I think about the people I met in that classroom, people I knew for a maximum of 20 hours and will never see again, and I pine. 
 But it's more about the way that none of the characters get freaked out by this whole dreamscape thing, and nobody thinks it's weird, and then there's the strange ball, and I know I'm not explaining this very well, but it was all so surreal. Like The Mighty Boosh. (What the fuck was that all about.) I'm not getting my point across very well, probably because it was something I couldn't put my finger on - maybe the atmosphere, or something like that. It was just bizarre. 
 I haven't read Gier's Ruby Red series, and I'm not sure I'll bother, because I just really don't care for stories about London. I'm done with them for now. I don't want to read anything else about London. But this book was a strange mishmash for me, and while I'd love to read more of Liv's voice, I don't think I can really justify throwing myself back into this psychedelic funhouse for another 300 pages. I have better things to do.