Shelf Awareness--Call Down the Hawk

YA Review: Call Down the Hawk

Call Down the Hawk by Maggie Stiefvater (Scholastic Press, 480p., ages 12-up, 9781338188325)

Call Down the Hawk occupies the same fantasy-infused world as Maggie Stiefvater's stellar the Raven Cycle quartet. Fans of the previous series will enjoy delving deeper into the magical heritage of the Lynch brothers; new readers should enjoy this riveting follow-up trilogy opener.

Of his three brothers, Ronan Lynch has "the most dangerous of the secrets." He's a dreamer who can "fall asleep, dream of feathers, and wake with a raven in [his] hands." His father dreamt his mother into being, and Ronan, in turn, dreamt into being his "cherubic" younger brother, Matthew. Now that their parents are dead, Ronan's older brother, Declan, holds what's left of the family together.

Hennessy, too, is a dreamer. Each time she sleeps for more than 20 minutes, she brings back "a copy of herself." Hennessy and her art-forging clones sneak into the Fairy Market--a place to buy illicit magical items--desperate to find a painting that may allow Hennessy to change her dream before she is literally killed by her own nightmares. Carmen Farooq-Lane goes to the Fairy Market after it's described in a premonition. She is part of a group dedicated to killing all dreamers in order to stave off an apocalypse that one of them will cause "with starving, unquenchable fire. Dreamed fire." Ronan, too, attends the Fairy Market--a stranger is whispering to him in dreams, and he thinks the Market may offer answers.

Stiefvater's (All the Crooked Saints) melodious prose is as gorgeous as ever, but here the tone is grittier, as players both new and familiar operate in a dangerous, surreal underbelly in and around the nation's capital. Alliances form, victories are hard to gauge and reality seems less and less certain. --Lynn Becker, blogger and host of Book Talk, a monthly online discussion of children's books for SCBWI.

Discover: In this first book in a YA companion trilogy to Stiefvater's the Raven Cycle, dreamers are pitted against a group of hunters determined to prevent a fiery apocalypse.