Call Down The Hawk by Maggie Stiefvater
So my intention was to review this prior to starting Mister Impossible, the second book in the series, because I find it difficult to review single books in a series if I’ve already read the whole thing. Evidently, that did not happen (idk why I bother planning anything, smh), but also I think more people need to read this series SO HERE WE ARE.
Call Down The Hawk is the first book in The Dreamer Trilogy, the adult follow up to Maggie Stiefvater’s YA hit ‘The Raven Cycle’. It focuses heavily on the ‘dreamers’ from TRC, people who are able to pull fantastical items out of their dreams. This is a book with lots and lots of characters, but I’ll outline the main POVs below. We have, in no particular order:
The Lynch brothers, the brothers Lynch, ostensibly our protagonists, and the main carryovers from the previous books. Declan, Ronan, and Mathew are, respectively, a muggle, a dreamer, and a dream. Their plot primarily revolves around them becoming embroiled in the wider world of the dreamers, discovering the secrets their late father left behind.
Carmen Farooq-Lane, a young woman whose brother was a dreamer, who has now turned to working with a sinister operation, intent on tracking down a specific dreamer who has been prophesied to destroy the world.
Jordan Hennessy, an art forger and dreamer, on a quest to figure out how to stop herself from repeatedly creating copies of herself.
Everything that is great about Stiefvater’s writing is at play here. The characters are interesting and complex, the prose ripples with personality and humour, and of course, everything is dark and strange and AWESOME. I’ve been reading Stiefvater’s books ever since I was little, and there’s always something there to like. For me, I felt like Call Down The Hawk drew together all my favourite things about her writing. This book is unapologetically itself, and I absolutely adored it because of that.
That said, there were elements I loved from The Raven Cycle (TRC) that I really missed. If you loved the found family element of TRC, for example, that isn’t really here. There’s also much less of a focus on romance. The lens has very clearly shifted away from examining how people relate to each other, and towards examining how individuals relate to the world around them, both past and present. If TRC was soft and gauzy, then Call Down the Hawk is mean and unforgiving. I don’t think it’s worse for that, it’s just very different, and a lot harsher.
If you’re coming to this without having read TRC, wondering if you can pick this one up and still understand what’s going on, I would strongly recommend checking out the first four books first, even if you don’t normally like YA. You could technically get through this without having read TRC as everything important is given again through (quite well handled) exposition, but you’d be missing out on a lot of nuance, particularly with the Lynch brothers’ plotlines.
Audiobook listeners, I would definitely recommend giving this one a miss, or reading with just your eyes. Will Patton does a great job with 99% of the characters, but the poor man can’t do a British accent to save his life. Considering a fair few of the major characters are from London, this gets very grating very quickly. It might be less annoying for any non-brits out there, but yeah, I think this is one of those ones where they might’ve been better off getting multiple voice actors in for the different povs.
Ultimately though, I felt that this was a fantastic followup to one of my all-time favourite series.
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