Review: Call Down the Hawk

Call Down the Hawk by Maggie Stiefvater
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not the biggest fan of The Raven Cycle - especially 'cause Stiefvater totally sank all my ships - but you know what? I went ahead to read this, if only to see where she takes Ronan next.

(Just no more problematic lines for the guy, mmkay, Maggie?)

In a lot of ways, it feels like The Raven Cycle never ended, and it's about the most perfectly mixed bag you could get. On the one hand, Ronan is our main protagonist by far for sure, while the original series so often made Blue, the ostensible protag, take such a backseat to the Raven Boys - especially Gansey, and often Ronan too, with the latter being far more justifiable in his occupancy of the spotlight. But in addition to Ronan, we have several other POV characters following their own parallel story, a story of promise in its exploration of how the world affects dreamers and dreamers affect the world. Unfortunately, as is all too often the case with The Raven Cycle, the additional storylines and POVs in this book prove very difficult to connect with or comprehend, to the point where I kept finding my eyes glazing over and losing interest in any part of the book that wasn't Ronan's story. Even when a significant part of that story is a ship that I still feel was manufactured purely to pander to the sort of fans who fetishize m/m pairings, but hey, at least the chemistry is far more present here than it was in The Raven King. So this is the first of a trilogy? I really do hope Stiefvater improves the following books...but I'm not gonna lie, my faith in her is slipping all over again.

View all my reviews