This gripping new fantasy novel will have children mesmerised

Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Storm and the Sea Hawk
Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Storm and the Sea Hawk - Tom de Freston

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 have been nominated three times for the Carnegie Medal. For readers who haven’t yet discovered Hargrave, the immensely enjoyable Geomancer fantasy series would be a good place to start.

The stories follow the adventures of Ysolda, a young girl whose idyllic existence in the village of Glaw Wood is threatened by the enigmatic “wolf queen”, who wants to appropriate the kingdom’s magic for her own ends. In the first instalment, last year’s In the Shadow of the Wolf Queen, Ysolda’s sister Hari was abducted by the queen’s knights. As The Storm and the Sea Hawk opens, Hari remains captive, and war – “undeclared but certain” – is threatening to devastate the realm: “Seeds sown for centuries, star years: bred in the bellies of sharks and the eyes of owls, in the hearts of rulers who had not the stomach nor the vision nor the heart for what they must do.”

For all the poetry, Hargrave seldom affords her heroines rest. The book opens with Ysolda waking to find herself “on a swimming wolf’s back, in the sea, clutching tight to a wolf queen’s daughter”. She is accompanied by her sea hawk Nara, “chirruping lightly on her shoulder”, and Sami, one of the queen’s escaped servants. Even by the standards of high fantasy, he has plenty to complain about, having been injured in a fight between the wolf queen and warriors working for her rival the brutish Thane Boreal, and nearly burned to death in the End-World Wood – not to mention being “worked to exhaustion in the wolf queen’s court”. Can he and Ysolda trust the queen’s rebellious daughter, Eira, and succeed in reaching the wilds of the Drakken Peak, freeing Hari, and saving the kingdom?

On one level, The Storm & the Sea Hawk has a clear environmental message, as Hargrave’s highly imagined landscape faces being destroyed by its climate: “Birds drop from the sky. Forests burn themselves. Oceans withdraw, unswallowing cities. Oceans rise, making islands of hills.” But Hargraves is too inventive a writer for such themes to feel merely modish. As with her previous novels, every character is drawn with acuity, and a complex plot is unravelled in clear, mesmerising style. Few could sum up her writing better than Hargrave has done herself: “I aim for my prose to be a balance of lyricism and pace… I also err towards brevity, which suits children’s books in particular. I enjoy getting to the point, and using unusual language to get there.” This enchanting novel shows that formula at its best.


The Storm and the Sea Hawk is published by Orion at £14.99. To order your copy for £12.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books