What happened in Blue Lily, Lily Blue by Maggie Stiefvater - Recaptains

The basics

Title: Blue Lily, Lily Blue

Author: Maggie Stiefvater

Series: The Raven Cycle #3

- The Raven Boys (September 2012)
- The Dream Thieves (September 2013)
- Blue Lily, Lily Blue (October 2014)
- The Raven King (April 2016)

Add it: Goodreads

Goodreads Summary:

There is danger in dreaming. But there is even more danger in waking up.

Blue Sargent has found things. For the first time in her life, she has friends she can trust, a group to which she can belong. The Raven Boys have taken her in as one of their own. Their problems have become hers, and her problems have become theirs.

The trick with found things though, is how easily they can be lost.

Friends can betray. Mothers can disappear. Visions can mislead. Certainties can unravel.

in short

what happened in Blue Lily, Lily Blue

• We begin with a psychic-cam. Persephone, an airy fairy psychic, tries to guide Adam into being similarly airy-fairy about communicating with the ley line. During this lesson they uncover the understanding that there are three supernatural sleepers on the ley line near them. One, Persephone decides, should definitely not be woken.
• Meanwhile, Calla is having a psychic moment of her own, enhanced by Blue. When trying to make contact with Maura, she instead makes contact with . . . something else, which chants a little ditty in her ear. “Queens and kings, kings and queens, blue lily, lily blue—” “Gosh,” interrupts the reader. “Is that the title?”
• Maura, the final psychic-cam, spends this entire time wandering in a cavern in an undisclosed location, searching for Blue’s long-lost biological father, Artemus. She doesn’t find him, but she finds a creepy mirrored lake.
• The teens go spelunking in Cabeswater to look for both Maura and Glendower. Do they find them? No. Here’s what they find: Gansey falling into a hole and having a panic attack. As Blue talks him down, ravens burst out of the hole around him, calling Make Way for the Raven King! in dubious Latin.
• Post-spelunking, the teens head into a different sort of dark hole: Washington D.C.! Gansey’s ancient professor friend Malory is coming into town to explore the ley line with them and they’re fetching him from the airport.
• Probably I should mention that Gansey touches Blue’s fingers during this car ride and the narrative strongly urges you to consider this sexy, which is a demonstration of how little game any of these characters have. Later, Blue gets even friskier when she secretly calls Gansey so they can talk about Congress and faxes. This is not code. This is their relationship. A little further on, there’s also a sensual yogurt-eating paragraph.
• True love
• With Malory and his service dog, Adam and Gansey explore other entrances to the cave system below the ley line. There is a West Virginia joke in this chapter.
• While the boys are out exploring, Blue is seeing her high school counselor about her college prospects. Does she find prospects? No. What does she find? Noah, sitting under the counselor’s desk. He explodes in a supernatural tantrum when Blue gets upset over her lack of options.
• Noah’s supernatural tantrumming continues back in Monmouth Manufacturing. He gets upset again — this time over his soul decaying (which, fair, I was just doing that last week) — and begins to creepily freak out. Blue pulls the plug on her energy and he diminishes immediately.
• While Blue is contemplating her ability to control her energy sources, a strange man comes for a reading at 300 Fox Way. He’s a villain, because who else comes to 300 Fox Way for on-page readings in this series? “Go to hell,” Calla tells him, which is also how I have ended some of my more memorable tarot readings.
• Speaking of that strange man, the boys discover that they have a new Latin teacher. Who’s this fancy man, Adam wonders as he objectively eyeballs the teacher’s looks and virility. He’s kind of . . . well, fancy. Spoiler! It’s the Gray Man’s boss, Colin Greenmantle, AKA the man who called the hit on Ronan’s dad. Never mind, Adam thinks, what I said about the fancy thing. Loser.
• Colin Greenmantle is in town to punish the Gray Man, who betrayed him in a previous episode. He’s brought his wife, Piper, who is blonde, bored, and ready for some kind of demonic adventure. This chapter has cows in it.
• The boys, Blue, and the ladies of Fox Way brainstorm what to do about Greenmantle in town, but the prognosis doesn’t look good. Greenmantle is not only is good at looking sharp in collared shirt, he’s also talented at making himself hard to kill. Basically he is 2/3rds of the way to Batman, only the final 1/3rd requires ethics taught by a disciplined butler so he’ll never make it all the way.
• Greenmantle is bad, but Gansey’s attention is elsewhere: focused on Noah’s increasingly terrible existence. He tells Adam that when they find Glendower, he wants to use Glendower’s supernatural favor to save Noah. Damn, Adam thinks, I always forget that Gansey is a Dick but not a dick.
• Using the ley line knowledge Malory has accrued, Blue and Gansey head out the next day to find another way into Cabeswater’s cave system. Do they find it? Yes, actually. They also find a guy named Jesse Dittley, who seems to have a curse of his own. He’s got a cave in his backyard that needs to eat a Dittley every so often or the walls of his house start to bleed. There is a cow pasture in this chapter.
• Piper Greenmantle gets a gun held to her head and becomes Personally Involved at this point.
• Not to be outdone by Blue+Gansey in the smooth romance department, Ronan touchingly drops by the auto shop Adam works at, forgetting that he has a night-horror from hell following him. The ensuing freak-out turns into a terse conversation and Ronan skulks off to just leave a gift of dreamed hand lotion in Adam’s car instead. What a player.
• Meanwhile, Blue is trying to think of where she has heard Jesse Dittley’s name before: oh right. The death list, the same one that Gansey is on. Well, shucks. Traumatized by the future before it has even happened, she calls Gansey for a little bit of romantic comfort and they discuss ducks. What a player.
• Murder Squash Song.
• There is a bit where Henry Cheng is introduced and gets a lot of page time as if he might be important in book four and sort of like now, by saying this, I’m further underlining the idea that he might be important in book four. He and Ronan get into a very small tiff that has less to do with plot and more to do with Ronan being a jerk.
• “It was,” Gansey thought, “as if time had carried Ronan a little more swiftly than the rest of them this summer.” That’s what street racing does to you; that, and a higher insurance premium.
• A chapter with cows in it follows. Ronan takes Adam to the Barns, his family home, to casually show him what he’s been working on: trying to dream a chunk of Cabeswater/ dream stuff to reanimate his mother, who is only awake while in Cabeswater because Jesus Christ this is complicated to explain. Ronan also confesses that he dreamed Matthew, his younger brother. Cows, cows, cows.
• All casual.
• Noah’s deader than dead woes increase when he is possessed by a mysterious entity at Jesse Dittley’s house and sings “Blue lily lily blue” at Blue. “Gosh,” interrupts the reader. “Is that the title?”
• Adam tells Blue that he has guessed Gansey is on the death list.
• Blue and Gansey go for a drive and finally they get really intimate: he gives her his coat to wear and teaches her how to drive a manual car. All of this 1950s level sensuality is interrupted by Henry Cheng, who has broken down by the side of the road. It wasn’t like they were going to kiss anyway; they might as well pause to allow Henry to have a small amount of character development that might set up book four.
• The teens go spelunking in Jesse Dittley’s backyard and find a tomb in the cave, which turns out to hold Gwenllian, Glendower’s bastard daughter. She has been not-sleeping in a coffin for a few hundred years and is a little batty and a lot psychic. Persephone welcomes her into 300 Fox Way and Calla tells Adam and Ronan to go get supplies for her.
• “Ronan pointed at the cart. ‘Get in there.’”
• Adam asks Ronan to dream a host of unpleasant artifacts to blackmail Greenmantle into leaving town. Ronan does, but the dream turns into a nightmare, and he dreams a dying copy of himself, an event that strikes them both.
• While Adam is recovering from the nasty shock of the dying forged Ronan, Adam’s father comes to his apartment to generally be unpleasant. Adam drives him away by generally being Cabeswater’s creepy little friend.
• Just as Persephone is trying to help Adam come to his full potential, Gwenllian is, in her sing-song way, trying to show Blue how she is not merely an amplifier for other people’s powers, but rather a sort of witchy mirror with perks of her own. This chapter could be called TRY HARDER, BLUE SARGENT.
• Meanwhile, the Greenmantles are beginning to really muck things up in Henrietta. Piper has gotten bored with waiting for Colin to get revenge and has instead made contact with some sort of sleeping entity beneath the ley line. It doesn’t seem like a good idea for her to pursue it, but she decides to DO IT ANYWAY.
• Adam, whose relationship with Cabeswater has been much improved by Persephone’s tutelage, proves their close tree-bond when a bunch of roof tiles get dropped on him at Aglionby. Cabeswater prevents his death and makes him look 100% creepy in front of his classmates. Gansey is like: BRO. Ronan is like: HOT. Henry is like: CAN I BE IN BOOK 4.
• On the heels of this realization that he holds more power in his relationship with Cabeswater than he thought, Adam heads to the court case against his father. He’s told no one about it because he thinks it’s important to be Super Cool Loner Guy. As he stands there in dread, the doors burst open and what does he find? Gansey and Ronan there to support him emotionally.
• True love
• Now that Adam realizes that he needs his friends even if they are problematic rich boys or magical trees, he asks Blue to go with him to scry for information about Maura’s location, rather than going to scry alone, which is dangerous. He stumbles across a rather scary entity in the dream space, and when Blue and Noah save his life by pulling him out of the scrying space, he tells them that he saw Maura.

how did it end?

That’s what happened in Blue Lily, Lily Blue! Check out our recap list for more recaps. If you can’t find what you need, you can request a recap from us!

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Other recaps for this series:

• The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle #2)
• The Raven Boys (The Raven Cycle #1)