Rating: ★★★☆☆
Genres: Young Adult, Fantasy
Ronan Lynch is a dreamer. He can pull both curiosities and catastrophes out of his dreams.
Jordan Hennessy is a thief. The closer she comes to the dream object she is after, the more inextricably she becomes tied to it.
Carmen Farooq-Lane is a hunter. Her brother was a dreamer … and a killer. She has seen what dreaming can do to a person, and the damage that their dreams can do. But those are nothing compared to the destruction that is about to be unleashed…
Call Down the Hawk is the sequel to The Raven Cycle, and I’ve seen some readers say it can be read on its own, but I think it’s difficult to get the universe, the relationships between the characters, the “rules” of dreaming without reading them, so I actually recommend picking up TRC first if you’re interested in the Dreamer series.
I enjoyed TRC, giving the books between 3 and 4 stars, but The Dream Thieves was my least favorite of them. Dream sequences are my least favorite trope in fantasy books, so when I realized this series is quite focused on the dreamers, I knew I was most likely not going to love this. My mind was wandering a lot while listening to this as an audiobook. It also did not help that the narrator had this older, raspy voice, talking in a dreamy tone, which made me even more bored. It fit Ronan quite well, in my opinion, but with the other characters it didn’t quite work. I also find that Stiefvater’s writing is a bit too flowery for my taste and so, so slow. All in all, the story held a lot of promise and had some really cool parts, but otherwise I was bored very often.
I don’t have only complaints, though – for a dream-focused story, it was actually interesting and with intriguing characters. I particularly liked Jordan, the forgery expert with the other girls who looked exactly like her. Reading about the relationship between the Lynch brothers a bit more was also very interesting, and I’m glad we got to see more of Declan. I think if you loved TRC, and you loved The Dream Thieves especially, you will really love this book.
Naty's Bookshelf 
Great review! This was really helpful. I’ve read TRC and I loved it a few years ago but think I wouldn’t like it as much now, so I was not planning to read this spin-off series until it was added to our Women’s Prize Squad list. The Dream Theives (and dream sequences in general) was also not my favorite, so I suspect I’ll end up feeling similarly to you about this one. It’s good to have a sense of what to expect! I’m glad you found parts of it interesting even without loving the dream focus.
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Maybe you’ll have better luck – I think most people really love it! And the audio did kind of ruin the reading for me, ugh.
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