Kami Garcia and Gabriel Picolo’s Teen Titans: Beast Boy Loves Raven continues their retelling of the Titans’ origins following their previous books, Raven and Beast Boy, introducing two of the core Titans to each other. Both Raven and Gar find themselves in Nashville to meet Slade Wilson, who secretly works to recruit empowered teens for H.I.V.E. While they wait, they keep running into each other in the city and eventually begin spending time together sampling the food and seeing the sights. In addition to further exploring these characters as they interact, balancing their desire to share with each other against their natural instinct toward self-reliance following the events of their own books, Garcia and Picolo begin to introduce the other Titans.

In a great bit of foreshadowing, Gar and Raven split up at a crossroads with Robin street (p. 91). Damian Wayne, similarly summoned by Slade, finds himself tailing Raven and Gar while Raven’s foster sister, Max, uses her ability to commune with spirits in order to keep an eye on Raven. As in the previous volumes, Slade largely appears in the background, though he helps to foreshadow Starfire (p. 71, 181). Just as George Pérez and Mark Wolfman used the Titans to touch on adolescent themes, Garica and Picolo use Gar and Raven’s developing powers as a key allegory for adolescence (172).

Like the previous volumes, Garcia demonstrates a remarkable understanding of these characters in her writing. She sets them in the modern day, but their essence comes through in a way that reveals just why they continue to resonate with readers. Meanwhile Picolo fully demonstrates his artistic talents here, again rendering characters with contemporary designs that evoke the earlier work of Pérez and Wolfman while situating the characters in the modern day. Colorist David Calderon continues to play with the themes he developed in the previous books. Where Raven and Beast Boy all had unique palettes reflecting their central characters, Calderon begins to blend those palettes and bring in new color themes for Damian Wayne and Starfire, foreshadowing the vivid life of the Titans as a whole. Beast Boy Loves Raven is a wonderful story for long-time Teen Titans fans as well as newcomers, honoring their history while updating it for new readers. ( )

Representation: N/A?
Trigger warnings: N/A?
Score: Seven points out of ten.
This review can also be found on The StoryGraph.
This was a good novel, but I enjoyed the first one better. In the book, Raven and Garfield meet each other for the first time, Garfield didn't have much personality, but he had cool superpowers, and an attraction to Raven, and once again, I liked Raven developing her character further, it really adds to the story as a whole. There's a new antagonist, which was just an evil corporation, and they trapped Raven and Garfield in some cells to experiment upon them, but they managed to escape the building (Garfield's beast powers contributed to this), but they had to leave the corporation alone, which was kind of bittersweet. If you like a story about superheroes with character development, this is the book for you, but you might need to read the books in order first before you read this one. ( )

I loved it, but I'm really wondering how the Robin part of storyline is going to work when Starfire comes around ( )

of the three, this is my least favorite, but I'm still intrigued enough to keep going ( )

Perfectly sweet. My only complaint is that each of these graphic novel volumes are so short that I feel a little unsatisfied. Maybe I'd like them more if they were grouped together in one larger novel? ( )