Ballad [Paperback]

I have to admit I am already a big fan of Maggie Stiefvater and her Mercy Falls wolves series of novels, "Shiver", "Linger" and "Forever". I chose this book based on my love for that series of books, but I also purchased the prequal to this, "Lament". On its own the book is very well written and is an enthralling page turner, that focuses on the characters James and Nuala. However, to fully appreciate what is going on in "Ballad" you really need to have read "Lament" first to fully get to grips with it.

James is a music prodigy who plays the bagpipes like no other and he attracts the attention of Nuala, a Leanne Sidhe fairy who feeds off his musical aura.

James is in love with Dee, but she is in love with a fairy and despite almost losing his life for her, she keeps him at a distance and James feels lonely, but for the call of antlered Kings song. Nuala is a seductive temptress who can change her appearance to attract any young man, but she only wants James, but unlike the many men before him, she does not want to take his life and this has consequences for them both.

Will James ever have a love for keeps?

Recommended for female readers, aimed at young adult, but I am 36 and loved it! Also recommend that you read "Lament" first to get into the background of this novel. Fanatastic!

Those of you who are not writers will have to bear with me a moment. Those of you who do make a living writing, will know what it is to hand in a book. Before it, there are the weeks, possibly months, of lock-down, when your friends think you've given up on them, your partner thinks you've fallen out of love, your parents and children think they've lost you to some cult which prevents you from ever contacting the outside world and when they have the bad grace to die before the book's done, and their surviving spouses want some kind of input, they are surprised when you bite their heads of because, don't they get it? Nothing Matters But the Book.

Strangers who think they can just ring up in the middle of a working day (which stretches from getting up to going to bed) are put right with very little sympathy or tact, editors get one-line answers to lengthy emails, planned meetings with agents are cancelled because the book isn't done yet.

And then one day you come to the end of the fifth, or fifteenth draft and suddenly all the pieces have slid into place and the writing is at last coherent and your editor who said, 'the answer is always in the text' was absolutely right and you've put the last full stop at the end of the last sentence and tidied up the presentation and attached it to an email and hit 'send'...

And then there's the vacuum of afterwards. Granted there is a pile of admin to be done that would reach to the ceiling were it not all electronic, but there's a gap when you can't touch the book because it's gone to someone else who is going to edit the version they have and the one thing worse than handing in a poorly finished book is messing with it aftewards: version control is everything.

That's when you need to sit down and devour someone else's writing. You know it took them a year of hard work to create, but you're still going to read it in a day. Or less. You need absolutely stunning, magical, wonderful, awe-inspiring writing, but it needs not to be in your field. It needs to be utterly impossible for you to sit there and wish you'd written it, or wonder why you hadn't written something just like it. It needs to be different. And inspiring. And how hard it is, exactly, to find that kind of a book amidst all the absolute drivel that is printed and published?

Very hard. But Ballad, by Maggie Stiefvater is that book. Granted, it would help if you're read it's predecessor, 'Lament' first, but you don't have to, and actually, it won't hurt if you read them in reverse. Lament was about Dee, who fell in love with Luke - the faerie assassin sent to kill her - and Ballad is about Jamie, who loved Dee, but falls in love with Nuala, who lives by feeding off superbly talented young men. And Jamie is as talented as they come. It's a love story. It's a faerie story, but these are not Tinkerbell 'say-I-don't-believe-in-fairies-and-watch-them-die' kind of fairy, these are faeries, and they kill people. They don't like iron, they can be summoned by burning thyme, they are afraid of Cernunnos, in his guise as the Thorn King, Lord of the Dead (Stag-dreamers, read this; you'll love it) - or they were until the new queen of Faerie, devised a way by which they might ally themselves with Him.

It's a school story too - Thornking-Ash is a boarding school for talented musicians, but the teachers know more than they should do about Faerie and the narrative arc of Sullivan, the coolest teacher in the world, is outstanding.

It's the use of language that sets Maggie Stiefvater's writing apart. The sheer, glorious poetry of every line. The ability to get inside the heads of her characters, so that everyone, even the most minor, is full and rounded and not a cardboard cut-out two-dimensional cipher. These are real people, who can hear the Thorn King singing.

And then there's the plots - she understands the rules of the old Celtic ballads, of the ways They (the faeries) work. But she knows that rules are there to be broken and it's in the breaking of them that she shines.

Read this: it's easy, it's wonderful, it'll make you laugh out loud and wish you were adolescent again. Well, maybe not the latter, but it will make you smile. And it will re-affirm your belief in the power of language and the ability of black marks on a white page to hold someone completely against the lure of computer games and all the internet holds.

I picked this after all the students at school telling me the first in the series, Lament, was so good. It's taken me a while to get round to it though.

Unfortunately it's just not for me. I'm not keen on the genre and feel this type of thing is much more suited to the young adult reader. The pace just isn't fast enough for adult readers and I just found myself getting a little bored.

I think you definitely need to read this series in order so it makes sense. Sorry kids - I didn't enjoy this (but I enjoyed it more than Twilight!)