… And then you wake up and think: what a boring dream it was! – review of the book “Summon the falcon”

The new book by the author of widely read series for young people promised to be interesting and quite unusual. The main topic, that is dreams and what and who can arise as a result of them, was already warming the imagination. How did it go in practice?

I must admit that I thought I hadn’t read anything by Maggie Stiefvater so far, but while preparing to write this text, I checked what came out of her pen and reminded me of the Tremor series . I didn’t make it to the end, but those two volumes about Mercy Falls werewolves weren’t the worst, and they were in line with my werewolf fascination when I was in my twenties. Unfortunately, I cannot say many favorable words in the case of Summon the Falcon .

REM phase

The story has several main characters. So there is Ronan Lynch, an aggressive and extremely talented dreamer. He is the only one of the three Lynch brothers (apparently you could meet them in the raven cycle), who inherited his abilities from his murdered father. The next heroine is Jordan Hennessy, also a dreamer, but burdened with a taint causing that every time she dreams she is forced to bring her copy to reality. On the one hand, it creates a family for itself, on the other hand, each successive Jordan dream is a step closer to the dreamer’s death. The last of this trio is Carmen Farooq-Lane, a huntress tasked with finding and pinpointing the organization to which she belongs – all dreamers. Why? Because one of them is to bring the apocalypse into the world, and as you know, it’s better to kill everyone than to risk it.

NREM phase

As I have already announced, the plot goes to the predicted end of the world, or at least this is more or less to be suspected from the 300+ side, because before that it is quite difficult to say whether it has a specific direction. The events unfold slowly, and the emphasis is more on the characters’ creations and their relationships with other characters. On the one hand, it gives us interesting personas, on the other, a cruelly boring plot, which is hard for a human to sit still. Certainly noteworthy is the idea of ​​an unusual talent for dreaming things up, i.e. bringing them in material form to everyday life.

The theme of dreams and dreams is constantly intertwined in the novel, and the author, in order to emphasize them, tries by force to introduce either unclear statements or descriptions that are supposed to imitate the absurdity and specificity of dreams. It does not work out well for her, because in general the reader simply gets tired of it and perceives it as overcomplicated. The style of the Stiefvater definitely lacks lightness and dreaminess.

Insomni was not found

These over five hundred pages made me extremely tired, and the ending itself did not bring any satisfaction. It is hard to say where this story will go, since nothing is entirely clear here. In all of this, however, I feel sorry for these interestingly described heroes, because they definitely deserve a better story.