Call Down the Hawk: a spoilery recap

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On October 18, the final installment of the Dreamer Trilogy, Greywaren, comes out (yay! whoo! etc!). It’s been a hot second since the first two books have come out and not everyone has time to reread 800 pages before October, so I’ll be posting recaps here. If you’d like to read recaps of the books in The Raven Cycle as well, you can find them on Recaptains.

Without further ado, Call Down the Hawk.

SUM UP:

Call Down the Hawk is the first book in the Dreamer Trilogy, a spin off trilogy that follows the four-book Raven Cycle. It focuses on the orphaned Lynch brothers—irritable Declan, irascible Ronan, and irresistible Matthew—about a year after the events of The Raven King (there is a short story, “Opal,” that covers some of that gap). The Dreamer Trilogy silently watched the Raven Cycle spend four books combining coming-of-age tropes, thriller elements, and Celtic mythology in ill-advised proportions and then stood up and said “hold my beer.” It spends three books shoveling art history, car chases, mobsters, ancient Irish stories, forgery, chronic illness, and generational trauma into the washing machine and pouring so much soap in over the top that bubbles coat the floor almost instantly.

Despite the global scope of the spin-off, the emotional core is quite intimate: Ronan, who is both dangerous and dying because of his ability to pull things out of his dreams, attempts to follow his high school boyfriend Adam to college. When his uncontrollable dreaming prevents this future, an anguished Ronan kicks off a series of events that will eventually lead to all the characters facing the end of the world as they know it.

(we all know someone like that, don’t we? who makes their relationship woes everyone else’s problem)

In order, the books are: Call Down the Hawk, Mister Impossible, and Greywaren.

THINGS TO REMEMBER ABOUT THE LYNCH FAMILY:

• Ronan, the middle brother, can pull objects from dreams. He lives in the Barns, his childhood home near the Virginia mountains.

• Matthew, the youngest, is a dream, brought out of one of Ronan’s dreams by accident long ago. He lives with Declan in Washington, D.C. He’s still in school.

• Declan, the eldest, has been tasked with parenting his brothers since their parents’ deaths, both legally and emotionally. He lives in a townhouse their dead father Niall left him in his will.

• Before the events of TRC, Niall was beaten to death in his own driveway after living a life of crime and selling dreams on the black market. Declan knew about his business. Ronan and Matthew didn’t.

• Aurora, the mother, fell into an unshakeable sleep when Niall died. Later, during TRC, she died gruesomely along the ley line in a fairly emotionally manipulative scene because Stiefvater is like that.

THINGS TO REMEMBER ABOUT THE DREAM MAGIC:

• The world of the Dreamer Trilogy is largely the same as our world; most people have no knowledge of magic.

• Ronan has met only two other dreamers in his life, his father and a fellow student, but both are dead, so he assumes there aren’t any others (dubious assumption, but Ronan’s a high school drop out who never took stats)(stay in school, kids!).

• Ronan needs to manifest his dreams regularly or he becomes unstable.

• He must also be close to a ley line (an invisible energy line) in order to dream with focus.

• These two facts have made him virtually a prisoner of the Barns. Leaving for too long makes him bleed black (he calls it nightwash) and also lose control of just what he brings from his dreams.

• If a living dream’s dreamer dies, the dream falls fast asleep permanently.

• EXCEPT, of course, they are brought to rare places of power along the ley lines, where they must stay forever (or fall asleep when they leave).

• The ley lines seem to be suffering lately, causing living dreams to have vague spells even if their dreamer is fine.

THINGS TO REMEMBER ABOUT THE BAD GUYS:

• Dreamers are being hunted by a group called The Moderators who seem to operate under government approval. They are trying to stop the apocalypse.

• They think there will be an apocalypse because they work with Visionaries, so called because they have premonitory visions of an apocalypse caused by dreamers.

• Ordinarily, Visionaries’ prophetic dreams are deadly to anyone within hearing range, but the Moderators have taught the Visionaries to turn their visions inward. This makes them safe for others but eventually kills the Visionary.  

• The Visionaries find the sacrifice worth it, though, because they’re saving the world, yo! They let Moderators use the more immediate parts of their visions to track down nearby Zeds.

• Together, they eliminate all dreamers (they call them Zeds, because you Zzzz when you sleep)(get it?) who refuse to stop manifesting dreams.

• Which is all of them, savvy?

OK BUT WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED

The events of the Dreamer Trilogy are bound into several threads which eventually snarl together. It is easiest to remember them individually:

CARMEN FAROOQ-LANE: Farooq-Lane joined the Moderators after her brother, Nathan, killed her parents with a dreamt weapon, and it came to light that they weren’t the first people he’d offed. Magical serial killer is a GO. Thinking he’s the dangerous Zed the Visions are warning of, she leads the Moderators to Ireland where they shoot Nathan in the face. Unfortunately, this only gives her massive future therapy bills and does nothing to stop the ominous visions. She takes point on traveling with Parsifal Bauer, the currently dying Visionary, to find the Visionary who will replace him and also the next Zeds to be shot in the face: Ronan Lynch, Hennessy, and Bryde. They have a rocky relationship that ends heartwarmingly and disgustingly with a dying Parsifal making sure Farooq-Lane is connected with Liliana, the next Visionary, because he says that she will be important to Farooq-Lane. Oooooh important you say? KISSY emoji LADY emoji EXPLOSIVE DANGEROUS VISIONS emoji

ADAM: speaking of KISSY emoji a brief reminder of where Adam is at in this installment. After a character arc that was exhausting to everyone in TRC, including himself, he’s made it to Harvard and befriended some snazzy new friends who call themselves the Crying Club, but it’s not without its complications. Namely, that Adam has lied about to the Crying Club about absolutely everything in his past, lost his accent, and discovered that his boyfriend Ronan is slightly in the thrall of this dude named—

BRYDE: Bryde first comes to Ronan in dream space, manifesting only as a voice, albeit one who knows a lot about being a dreamer and about being Ronan. He seems interested in all the ways the world is trying to break dreamers and dreams. He also seems interested in how Ronan might change all that. He prompts Ronan to jump through a series of hoops in order to prove that he is worthy to meet Bryde, and even though he’s got a definitely Cult Vibe going on, by the end of the book, he seems like the only option for survival in a world that wants dreamers dead.

DECLAN: Declan has always suspected the world wants everyone dead. He’s lived in caution/ paranoia since their father’s murder. However, at the beginning of Hawk, he snaps: he spends the book tracking down one of his father’s dream objects: “The Dark Lady,” a painting of a woman who looks a lot like Aurora, but who turns out to be Mór Ó Corra, Niall’s first wife and Declan’s actual birth mother—a fact readers didn’t know but that Declan is well aware of. He’s desperate for family that understands him, explains him, and is less likely to be killed by a dangerous world (unlike Ronan, who he finds frighteningly fragile). Declan tracks the painting down at the D.C. Fairy Market, a blackmarket for illegal or inexplicable goods and services. There he meets Jordan, an art forger, who turns out to also want the painting, and also Declan’s boring, boring body. The two spend equal times double-crossing each other and flirting, although true romance is impossible, because Declan is the emotionally constipated fake father to two manchildren Lynch brothers and Jordan is the dreamt copy of a self-destructive young woman with mommy issues.

HENNESSY: This particular self-destructive young woman with mommy issues dreams of flinging herself from the rooftop of the McMansion she squats in, but she can’t—she’s a dreamer, and if she dies, all her copies living with her (and there are many) will fall asleep. Ever since her mother’s suicide, Hennessy dreams the same dream every time she falls asleep, a nightmare about a monstrous entity called the Lace. Unlike Ronan, she can’t choose to not bring something from a dream, so in order to keep from bringing the Lace into the real world, she chooses herself: manifesting copy after copy of herself in the waking world, starting with Jordan. Because this process is killing her, Jordan and the other girls have come up with a plan to steal “The Dark Lady,” which, aside from also featuring the certified hottie Mór Ó Corra, has the mystical ability to make whoever sleeps under the same roof as it dream of the sea. That plan nearly drowns both Hennessy and Jordan, but it introduces them to Ronan, who rides to the rescue at the last minute, guided with uncanny intel from Bryde’s voice in his head.

RONAN: After trashing his forever-love’s Harvard dorm room with dreamt murder crabs, Ronan falls into a deep depression, which is only shaken loose by the arrival of Bryde’s game in Ronan’s dream. It’s very appealing to think there’s another, wiser dreamer out there with a plan. A little too appealing, actually. Ronan isn’t sure if Bryde is real or not, but those worries dissipate with evidence of him in the real world: rumors circulate about Bryde at the Fairy Market, and Bryde is also able to direct Ronan to save Hennessy from drowning in the nick of time. Bryde also knows about Ronan’s dreamt forest, Lindenmere . . . no one knows about that. Despite Declan and Adam’s uncertainty, Ronan continues pursuing Bryde and answers, and after Hennessy’s family is killed by the Moderators, it seems he made the right call. Things are getting out of control. They need Bryde. (narrator note: this is a dubious assumption, too. stay in school, kids!)

THE CLIMAX

As the Moderators circle closer, cornering Hennessy and Ronan, the two extremely messed up dreamers call for Bryde in a dream (to CALL DOWN THE HAWK, Stiefvater said shrilly, DO YOU GET IT THAT IS WHY IT IS CALLED THAT). They also dream a matched pair of swords (very grown up, very smooth, definitely what cool people do). When Ronan and Hennessy wake up, Bryde sweeps them off on a dreamt hoverboard (look, I told you this series went hard). They won’t return until they have solved the problem of the Moderators.

WHAT’S PROMISED?

• that we’ll see more of Declan’s birth mother, Mór Ó Corra. Her appearance in this book was brief but strongly implied she had no need to speak to her son ever again. Well, so did the New Fenian, her companion (who is the spitting image of a young Niall Lynch), who told Declan to keep clear of Mór if he wanted to be safe.

• that Farooq-Lane is going to have to face a reckoning about using mass murder as a coping device for dealing with her brother being a serial killer.

• that Bryde will teach Ronan and Hennessy how to dream and then possibly steal their wallets, seriously, dude is sus

• that Adam cannot continue to lie his pants off because, Adam Parrish, Gansey did NOT go through four books watching you flail through a character arc just to end it like this.

• that Jordan and Declan are probably going to get to third base. Or fourth. I can’t remember the bases. Whichever base it is, you can bet your bippy there will probably be some boring art history anecdote that happens within a page of it on either side.

• and finally, that eventually the fears that both Declan and Ronan have—that Matthew will be unable to stay awake on his own, that dreamers cannot live in a world built for the waking—will come true.