Wednesday, December 18, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Call Down the Hawk by Maggie Stiefvater




Call Down the Hawk is the first novel in Maggi Stiefvater's new trilogy, the Dreamer Trilogy, which is essentially a sequel to her YA Raven Cycle.  I really loved The Raven Cycle, which over four books that only got better and better with each installment told a story of love and dreams.....oh and also Magic, Quests for Welsh Kings, Demons, Psychics, and more.  Most importantly, it was a story of great characters, from our main quartet to the minor characters, who you just couldn't help loving over the course of the story as things played out.  Call Down the Hawk begins a new story centered around one member of that quartet, Ronan Lynch, who possesses the magical power to bring things out of his dreams.

I should point out that I'm not sure how Call Down the Hawk would play for someone who hadn't read The Raven Cycle first, but as someone who has, it doesn't disappoint.  Both our returning characters (Ronan and his family, Adam in small cameos) remain great, and the new characters and concepts are excellent, bringing forth a plot that remains compelling from beginning to end.  That said, the one key difference between this book and the prior ones is that those books were always at least partially stand-alone, whereas the ending of this novel will in no way be satisfying to a reader.  But it certainly has me excited for more to come.

Note: Some minor spoilers for The Raven Cycle follow - not really any that would affect your enjoyment of that series, but still.  

 Note2:  I read this as an audiobook, so some of the names and concepts may be misspelled below.  But the audiobook reader remains the same as in the Cycle and he is still excellent, so I recommend this book in that format.  
-----------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------------
Ronan Lynch is all alone with his dreams - his friends having left on a road trip, and his boyfriend now in College.  But Ronan's dreams are more significant than most, as Ronan can still pull things from them into reality, and now another Dreamer - named Bryde - seems to be invading them and speaking to Ronan of things to come.

Declan Lynch wants for his family - Ronan and his dreamt brother Matthew - to be safe, and to live a life in peace.  For so long, Declan has tried to accomplish this by living a life no one would notice....but Declan has always wanted something more deep inside, and in a single giving in to that desire, he may have unleashed the worst upon his family.

Jordan Hennessy would seem to be a master forger of art - but secretly she is not even "real", a dreamt creation of the real "Hennessy", who would fall asleep forever if her dreamer ever died.  But Jordan struggles to stay alive, and to find a life of her own, as time seems to be running out.

Carmen Farooq-Lane's brother was another dreamer....and he brought death upon her family.  Now she's a member of the Moderators, an intergovernmental organization using soothsayers known as "Visionaries" to find Dreamers and kill them....for it is foreseen that one Dreamer will eventually destroy the world.  Yet as Carmen enters Washington DC with a young visionary, she begins to doubt the goodness of her mission and the people she works with, despite her knowledge of the potential for the end of the world.

When the dreamers, the dreamt, the hunters, and those touched by them come together in one place, danger will arise, and not everyone will make it out alive in the end, and those that do may not find themselves with a dreamy ending......
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As with the Raven Cycle, Call Down the Hawk splits its narrative between chapters featuring the perspectives of a number of characters, mainly Ronan, Declan, Jordan, Carmen, and Hennessy.  Other characters do show up to narrate, and there dose seem to be sort of an omniscient global narrator at times, but these are our main five, and it's their story arcs that carry this story.  I should point out once again that unlike in the Raven Cycle, this book doesn't really have an independent story to go along with the overall series arc - this is simply the first novel in a longer arc, so don't expect any sort of resolution here like we'd get in each of the four Raven Cycle books.

But while this book doesn't have any individual story arcs that go from beginning to end, it has a bunch of character arcs that are just fantastic, even if none of them find themselves finished at the end of this novel.  Ronan remains a fantastic lead character, and now that he's lonely without Adam and the rest of his friends and fears being left behind, his concerns take him to different places, leaving him especially driven to taking reckless actions to satisfy his curiosity, especially as hidden truths behind the Lynch family past seem to come to light and the things that the Bryde foretells come true.  Declan getting his own personal point of view here really rounds him out as a character, as we see the love he has for his family and his need to protect them, and that the polish of his that Ronan hates so much is really a deliberate camouflage that Declan uses to avoid attention....despite secretly wishing he didn't have to.

And then there's the new characters, particularly Jordan and Hennessy, who showcase the other harsher consequences of dreaming.  Jordan is a dreamt construct, and yet she has a full personality, wants, and loves, and desperately wants to find a way to survive - by keeping Hennessy alive - and to have a life of her own independent of Hennessy.  Hennessy meanwhile feels hopeless, as her every dream brings her closer to death...and she can't seem to dream anything else, to say nothing of her tragic past, and has to through Ronan find a way to control her dreaming to find anything else.  Thematically, the two are both forgers, creating art in the styles of other people instead of through the use of their own original thought, which might be a little on the nose, but makes so much sense for their personalities.

The final new character is Carmen, whose arc demonstrates the other part of this world that readers may have had questions about during The Raven Cycle: particularly the question about how was it likely that the two only Dreamers lived in the same town in Virginia?  The answer of course is that they don't, but that a military force around the world hunts down and kills Dreamers.  Carmen is our view of that world, and shows how this force is often cruel, killing not just dreamers who are threats, but also those who only dream innocent things and would never harm anyone else - moreover, that some of these forces seem to relish the violence a bit too much.  This is a much harsher book that the prior cycle, and Carmen's viewpoint shows that off.  Still, Carmen is really the weak link of all of the characters, as her own emotional arc seems by far the most incomplete at the end, with her interactions with the rest of the cast never occurring in her own point of view.

Really, that's the big complaint about this novel - it doesn't just end on a major cliffhanger, it leaves basically every question the book poses unanswered, and at some points questions the book brings up go without answer and without addressing for substantial lengths of plot, to the point where the reader may forget about them by the time they come up again in the narrative.  And there are sooooo many mysteries and questions teased out here, from the secrets of the Lynch family, to the truth behind the Dreamers' powers, to the end of the world, to how Visionaries work, etc.  It's kind of frustrating to be honest, which was never the case with the Cycle.

But man are the characters so damn good, that I can't help but wait extremely eagerly for the sequel to come out hopefully next year.  And if that one also ends on another cliffhanger like this (probably), god....sometimes being an avid reader is torture, in a good way.
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