The Call

The Call

Author: Peadar O’Guilin

Grade: A-

If you are a teenager in Ireland one day you will be called. Transported immediately from whatever you were doing to the Grey Lands where you have to survive the hunt. The vicious cruel Sidhe are chasing you. You will probably not survive. Your siblings will probably not survive. Your friends will probably not survive.

If you are one of the lucky ones (one in ten) you may wish that they had just killed you.

I really liked this book. I find the premise very intriguing and scary. There are good scenes of the kids training or just being kids and up and disappearing. Three minutes four seconds. That’s how much time passes in our world. That’s how much time you have to make your peace and prepare yourself for what might be sent back of the person you used to know.

For Nessa, the idea of the call is even more impossible as a disease has impaired her abilities to walk and pretty much everyone assumes that she’s toast.

So there were some great creepy moments and passages and I really felt for these kids (for the most part) also the author does a really good job of world building. Even though you mostly go between the training school and the Grey Lands, where the Sidhe live and hunt the kids, there’s enough of a good description about them blocking Ireland off and the planes falling from the sky and the economy beginning to crash and twenty-five year old music is all they get to make you feel it.

The hunts in the Grey Lands are awesome as well. It’s like some kind of Tim Burton-esque nightmare realm. Unreal in it’s craziness and very, very sad. No one escapes unharmed.

But I just didn’t find it scary. Which is kind of what I was hoping for on a Halloween read. It’s much more of a “survival/war story.” I think one of the other problems was that there was a human character so hateful, so over-the-top, that he sort of steals the show from the Sidhe at the end.

There’s going to be a second book apparently and this is one of the rare occasions where I’m totally down for the sequel.

Recommend: Yes.