The Call
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4.4 • 71 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
You have three minutes to save your life . . .THREE MINUTESYou wake up alone in a horrible land. A horn sounds. The Call has begun.TWO MINUTESThe Sidhe are close. They're the most beautiful and terrible people you've ever seen. And they've seen you.ONE MINUTENessa will be Called soon. No one thinks she has any chance to survive. But she's determined to prove them wrong. TIME'S UPCould you survive the Call?A genre-changing blend of fantasy, horror, and folkore, The Call will never leave your mind from the moment you choose to answer it.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
It’s hard to exaggerate the impact of The Hunger Games on teen fiction—the series has spawned a generation of young characters trained to survive harsh, horrific circumstances. The Call breaks the mold by weaving in Celtic mythology, pitting its willful heroine Nessa against the Sidhe, the malevolent fairies who wage battle on the Irish by whisking their teenagers away and hunting them down. It’s fresh and exciting, one of the most riveting adventures we’ve read in a while. Author Peadar O’Guilin has created a world that feel both intensely real and thrillingly spooky.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This intense, riveting tale is set in an Ireland that the S dhe, Irish faeries, have cut off from the rest of the world, plotting to retake their former home through a grim war of attrition that involves kidnapping human teenagers. During the "Call," teens disappear "for a little over three minutes, but in world, the Grey Land, an entire day has passed, panic and pain in every second of it." When the stolen teens reappear, they are usually dead and/or horribly mutated by magic. All Irish children attend special centers where they're taught martial arts, the S dhe language, and total ruthlessness. Nessa, already relegated to crutches due to polio (Ireland's isolation means no imported vaccines or anything else), seems unlikely to survive her Call, but has dedicated everything to doing so. O'Guilin (The Inferior) follows several teens, including Nessa, over into the Grey Land, delivering blisteringly fast-paced and graphic descriptions of the tortures the children endure. This is a bleak, gripping story, one where only the most muted of happy endings is possible. Ages 14 up.
Customer Reviews
Best Book I've Read All Year
This is a fantasy story about Ireland and the fairy folk. It's a fantastic take about what would happen if the fairy folk tried to take back Ireland. The story is so well written that it pulls you in and doesn't let you have a moments rest. I read a great many books and have read some fabulous books this year, but this is easily the best one I've read thus far. I'm so interested to see what the author publishes next!
Good book, but could be much better
Although I did enjoy reading this book and it was a very different take on the dystopian genre, I feel that it could be a little more creative and have a deeper storyline than it does. The storyline moves very slow and uninteresting until the middle-end of the book, and the way the antagonist is defeated at the end is very uneventful and there was so much hype built around it when nothing really ended up happening. The love story is pretty cliche in a book like this, but it isn’t horrible and adds another layer of characterization. The imagining of the grey land and the sidhe are very creative and unique, and the rising of a main antagonist through the bigger problem adds a necessary character/character conflict.