Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s debut novel, The Girl of Ink & Stars (2016), was published when she was 26. It won the Waterstone’s Book Prize; her subsequent nine books were nominated for the Carnegie Medal three times. For readers who are new to Hargrave, the highly entertaining fantasy series Geomancer would be a good introduction.
The stories follow the adventures of Ysolda, a young girl whose idyllic life in the village of Glaw Wood is threatened by the mysterious “Wolf Queen,” who seeks to use the kingdom’s magic for her own ends. In the first installment, last year’s “In the Shadow of the Wolf Queen,” Ysolda’s sister Hari was kidnapped by the queen’s knights. At the start of “The Storm and the Seahawk,” Hari is still trapped and a war – “undeclared, but certain” – threatens to ravage the realm: “Blessings sown over centuries, star years: bred in the bellies of sharks and the eyes of owls, in the hearts of rulers who had neither the stomach nor the vision nor the heart for what they had to do.”
For all the poetry, Hargrave rarely gives her heroines a rest. The book begins with Ysolda waking to find herself “clinging to the daughter of a wolf queen on the back of a swimming wolf in the sea.” She is accompanied by her sea hawk Nara, who “chirps lightly on her shoulder,” and Sami, one of the queen’s escaped servants. Even by high fantasy standards, he has much to complain about: he was injured in a battle between the Wolf Queen and warriors working for her rival, the brutal Thane Boreal, and nearly burned to death in the Endworld Forest—not to mention being “flayed to exhaustion in the Wolf Queen’s court.” Can he and Ysolda trust the queen’s rebellious daughter, Eira, and manage to reach the wilds of Drakken Peak, free Hari, and save the kingdom?
On one level, The Storm & the Sea Hawk has a clear environmental message, as Hargrave’s imaginative landscape is threatened by climate change: “Birds are falling from the sky. Forests are burning. Oceans are retreating, swallowing cities. Seas are rising, turning hills into islands.” But Hargraves is too imaginative a writer for such themes to be merely fashionable. As in her previous novels, each character is drawn with sharpness, and a complex plot is unfolded in a clear, intriguing style. Few could sum up her writing style better than Hargrave herself: “I aim for a balance between lyricism and pace… I also tend towards brevity, which is particularly suited to children’s books. I like to get to the point, and use unusual language to do so.” This charming novel shows that recipe at its best.
The Storm and the Sea Hawk is published by Orion for £14.99. To order your copy for £12.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
