Windily intriguing and pleasantly eerie. 
 I was a little surprised at how well I liked this book, given the languidness of the pacing and lack of answers delivered by the ending. (I should preface this by saying I listened to the audio book, and Patton does a phenomenal job with bringing the voices and characters to life. Also, Stiefvater went the impressive and spot-on impactful extra mile by creating an original musical composition piece exclusively for the audio book. I HIGHLY recommend this method of ingestion.) 
 This book is a series set-up, told from multiple 3rd-person POVs. The setting is a rural and vaguely mystical town in Virginia called Henrietta. Our primary characters are a 16-year-old girl named Blue--the eccentric-yet-sensible old-soul daughter of the town psychic. Fairly early on in the story she becomes caught up (almost against her will) with a tetrad of exclusive private school boys: Richard "Gansey", their old-soul history/mystery-obsessed leader; Ronan, the grief-torn rage monster; Adam, the meek and abused grease monkey; and Noah, the forgettable tag-along. 
 The urban fantasy elements are strong initially, but peter off for much of this particular book. And while the characters hold more depth and dimension than I typically see in mainstream YA, I didn't become particularly attached to any of them. It was the lyrical meandering of the prose and the novelty of the plot itself that kept this reader engaged. Despite the tension remaining low a vast majority of the time, the intrigue held on. All while presenting a small Southern town with something closer to realism than the condescension common in contemporary lit. 
 I picked up book #2 immediately, and that says a lot for the writing itself. 
 Content Note: To those parents and teens who it may concern, this book leaned somewhat heavily into -actual- (i.e. borrowed, not invented) occult elements. (Tarot card readings, scrying, astral projection, and what I would assume is possession.) The instructional how-to of which is sparse and primarily limited to tarot cards--at least in this book.