Early Review – All the Crooked Saints by Maggie Stiefvater (3/5 stars)

Reading Level: Young Adult
Genre: Paranormal
Length: 320 pages
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Release Date: October 10, 2017
ISBN-13: 978-0545930802
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: ARC form Amazon Vine
Rating: 3/5 stars

“Here is a thing everyone wants:

A miracle.

Here is a thing everyone fears:

What it takes to get one.

Any visitor to Bicho Raro, Colorado, is likely to find a landscape of dark saints, forbidden love, scientific dreams, miracle-mad owls, estranged affections, one or two orphans, and a sky full of watchful desert stars.

At the heart of this place you will find the Soria family, who all have the ability to perform unusual miracles. And at the heart of this family are three cousins longing to change its future: Beatriz, the girl without feelings, who wants only to be free to examine her thoughts; Daniel, the Saint of Bicho Raro, who performs miracles for everyone but himself; and Joaquin, who spends his nights running a renegade radio station under the name Diablo Diablo.

They are all looking for a miracle. But the miracles of Bicho Raro are never quite what you expect.”

I got this through the Amazon Vine program to review. I am a bit torn on this one. I generally am a big Stiefvater fan and, while this book was written in her trademark writing style, I had trouble staying interested in it.

The book is about a family that can perform miracles, but really they can only start the miracle and it’s up to the pilgrim who seeks the miracle to finish it. After they start the miracle they must avoid the pilgrim who requested it at all costs, if they don’t they can take on the pilgrim’s darkness which will lead to the unleashing of their own darkness.

It’s an interesting concept and the book is written in a beautifully ambiguous way. You never really know if these pilgrims are actually magically changed or if their strange transformations are more metaphorical in nature. The whole story is very heavy on magical realism.

The problem for me was that the story wandered a bit too much and jumped around too much. The jumping around distracted me and I had trouble staying engaged. In the end I just didn’t care much about the characters and their miracles. I also wasn’t in love with the desert setting either.

Overall while this is definitely written with Stiefvater’s beautiful, and somewhat ambiguously dreamy, writing style this just wasn’t a favorite for me.  I had trouble staying engaged in the story and ending being kind of bored.  I much preferred the Scorpio Races and The Raven Cycle.

This book goes towards the following reading challenges:
– You Read How Many Books? Reading Challenge
– New Release Reading Challenge
– Flights of Fantasy Reading Challenge
– Paranormal Reading Challenge
– YA Reading Challenge