Call Down the Hawk

I found this newest fantasy novel by Maggie Stiefvater something of a disappointment. I had read one of her earlier books (Scorpio Races) and really liked it so was very excited to win this book in a Kirkus drawing. The premise is intriguing. There are people, Dreamers, who can bring back into the real world anything they can dream about, including people. There are other people, Visionaries, who can foresee the future; they can be highly destructive and deteriorate psychologically pretty quickly so they have to be handled with care. Several have now seen the end of the world, brought about by a Dreamer who wants to set fire to everything. This has resulted in a campaign to kill all the Dreamers. Carmen Farooq-Lane is a hunter assigned to work with a string of visionaries to destroy all the Dreamers before this happens, regardless of whether or not the particular Dreamer is the one responsible for the future destruction of the world. Ronan Lynch is a dreamer. His younger brother is one of Ronan's dreams, although he doesn't know that at the outset of the story. When a Dreamer dies, all of his/her creations go to sleep--permanently. Older brother Declan Lynch has been trying to protect his two brothers from that event ever since their Dreamer father died and his dreamed wife and their mother went to sleep. Hennessey is also a Dreamer who seems doomed to creating copies of herself that she believes are killing her. As I said, interesting premise, but the first 300 some pages of this book felt like a slog; it seemed that way too much time was spent on talking about the creations of the Dreamers. Perhaps Stiefvater was just doing a thorough job of world building since this is intended to be the first in the "Dreamer Trilogy." This is a spinoff from an earlier series, the "Raven Cycle." It wasn't until the last 150 pages that I cared very much about the characters and that the action ratcheted up to engage me.
However, Kirkus called the book "exceptional," and Publishers Weekly gushes that this book offers "Exquisitely drawn characters and witty, graceful prose complement the artfully crafted plot." The Washington Post included it in their list of best YA fantasy to read now.