The Call

LoveReading Says

Super-suspenseful and ferociously intense, Peadar O'Guilin’s The Call takes Irish Sídhe folklore into terrifying territory through a fresh and feverish YA fantasy thriller that tells an electrifying story of revenge and endurance.   

As a result of society “working to keep its children innocent”, Nessa initially refuses to believe her parents when they finally disclose the “horrible truth” of what happens when kids hit their teenage years: “sometime during her adolescence, the Sídhe will come for her, as they come these days for everyone.

They will hunt her down, and if she fails to outrun them, Nessa will die”. Such has the situation been in Ireland for 25 years. That’s how long the magical Sídhe have been taking and torturing teenagers as an act of revenge on the humans who banished them to the grim Grey Land beneath the earth.

Given her “twisted legs”, Nessa’s parents are especially fearful for her future, but she’s nothing if not determined: “I’m going to live. And nobody’s going to stop me”. 

In order to give adolescents some chance of staying alive, they attend special colleges to be trained in survival skills and schooled in Sídhe language and history. In the words of one teacher, “we trapped an entire race of people in hell for all eternity just so we could take their homes for ourselves”. Dark in the extreme, and enormously gripping, faeries have never been so outrageously horrifying, and fights for survival have rarely been so brutally conjured.

Reviewed by Joanne Owen
Joanne Owen’s lifelong love of reading and writing began when she was growing up in Pembrokeshire, and very much wished that witches (and Mrs Pepperpot) were real.
More reviews by Joanne Owen

About The Call

Every teenager in Ireland is training to survive 'the call' - the three minutes and four seconds when each of them is transported to the desolate Grey Land of the long banished fae folk, the Sidhe. Nine out of ten do not return.

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