Review | Call Down the Hawk by Maggie Stiefvater

The dreamers walk among us . . . and so do the dreamed. Those who dream cannot stop dreaming – they can only try to control it. Those who are dreamed cannot have their own lives – they will sleep forever if their dreamers die.

And then there are those who are drawn to the dreamers. To use them. To trap them. To kill them before their dreams destroy us all.

Ronan Lynch is a dreamer. He can pull both curiosities and catastrophes out of his dreams and into his compromised reality.

Jordan Hennessy is a thief. The closer she comes to the dream object she is after, the more inextricably she becomes tied to it.

Carmen Farooq-Lane is a hunter. Her brother was a dreamer… and a killer. She has seen what dreaming can do to a person. And she has seen the damage that dreamers can do. But that is nothing compared to the destruction that is about to be unleashed…

It’s no secret that The Raven Cycle is one of my favourite series of all time, so I was worried about how Call Down the Hawk would live up to it – to the point where I put off reading it for a year out of worry that I wouldn’t fall in love with it. While I did enjoy Call Down the Hawk, I’m not sure that I loved it enough to re-read it time and time again like its predecessors.

Call Down the Hawk is the start in a Dreamer Trilogy, focused on Ronan and his brothers. I grew to like Ronan quite a bit as The Raven Cycle progressed, so I was slightly disappointed that Ronan didn’t get as much of a character arc as I had wanted in this. Call Down the Hawk deals more with what Ronan is facing in the present, including his relationship with Adam (which was, admittedly, less of a focus than I expected) and bonding with Declan (which was more of a focus than expected, but also was delightful to read about).

I loved meeting the new characters, especially Hennessy and Jordan, but I found myself missing Blue and Gansey; while the few glimpses of them were sweet, I wanted more. That being said, I now am unapologetically a Declan Lynch fan, and I did not expect that coming into this story.

While I knew that other Dreamers existed thanks to The Dream Thieves, I hadn’t realized how many others there were. Call Down the Hawk explores not only what it’s like to be a Dreamer, but also the danger that they face – both from Dreaming itself, but also from those that are hunting them down. In establishing these new threats to set up the series, the threats weren’t as well-fleshed out as I’d have liked; hopefully as the series progresses, these characters can be given more depth.

Overall, Call Down the Hawk was a solid instalment in a well-loved universe. I didn’t love it as much as The Raven Cycle, but I will definitely read the sequel.