Call Down the Hawk
by Maggie Stiefvater
read by Will Patton
Scholastic Audiobooks, 2019. 13 hours, 47 minutes, on 12 compact discs.
Review written December 14, 2020, from a library audiobook
Call Down the Hawk is billed as the first book in The Dreamer Trilogy, but I think readers will appreciate it more who have read the four books in The Raven Cycle, beginning with The Raven Boys. That series starts out being about Blue and Gansey, but is almost taken over by Ronan Lynch and his brothers. This new trilogy is about Ronan.
So if you already know the background, it won’t take as much getting up to speed. Ronan is a Dreamer – when he dreams at night, he brings back objects from his dreams. They don’t have to be possible objects – they don’t have to actually exist in reality. If he can dream it, he can wake up to find it real. One problem with this is that if Ronan goes too long without dreaming, he starts weeping a black fluid which will eventually kill him.
In this book, we meet some other Dreamers, notably a girl named Hennessy. Every time she dreams, she brings back a copy of herself, and another flower tattoo appears on her neck. The girls live together and specialize in forging art. They can easily pose as Hennessy herself. But they all know that when Hennessy runs out of room for flower tattoos, she’s going to die.
We also meet some Moderators and Visionaries. Visionaries dream what’s going to happen in the future. And all the Visionaries are saying that the world will be destroyed – because of something a Dreamer is going to bring into reality. The obvious solution? Kill all Dreamers. We follow along with one Moderator and the teen Visionary she monitors in order for him to lead her to more Dreamers.
There’s a lot more that’s going on in this book, and it quickly draws you in with the strangeness and the fascinatingly mind-bending scenarios. Things do not resolve by the end, though some of the threads do come together.
The reader of this book has a gravelly voice I didn’t find attractive, but the more I listened, the more I felt thought an unusual voice fits this particularly unusual book.
As with The Raven Cycle, there are many unpleasant things that happen in this book, but they are so unusual and so mind-bending, that I’m going to have to read on and find out what happens next as soon as I get the chance.
Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/call_down_the_hawk.html
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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.
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