Originally posted on Just Geeking by.

Content warnings:
This book contains scenes of blood, gore, violence, death, imprisonment and torture.

Many of the battles in this book take place within the sphere of the mind due to the use of mind magic, where the weapons are emotions, memories and manipulation. There are flash back scenes with graphic details of violence and blood, including death and trauma designed to mentally harm the person they are fighting.

Slavery exists in this universe in several forms. There are people who are controlled by magical collars, the collarbound, and the ungifted (non-mages) are conscripted into the mages’ army. In the army their will is taken away from them, and they are used as puppets, their bodies moved telepathically by the mages’ will.

A humanoid horned species called the kher are oppressed. They treated like animals, and upon death are brutally butchered for their horns which are used in armour and everyday items as protection against magic. If the kher try to stop this from happening they are arrested and beaten. There is reference to a scene in the last book where a family had to watch as their relative’s corpse was desecrated by a butcher in front of them.

There is also ableism in the book. Mages that use too much mind magic become lacunants, people who have lost their faculties and appear to have symptoms very similar to dementia. The mages do not look after their fallen brethren, they leave them to rot as beggars outside the gates of their castle.

In the previous book we were introduced to a world of magic, with mages ruling supreme over the ungifted and a non-human horned race called the khers. The khers are treated like animals, relegated to a ghetto and their bodies are harvested when they die as their horns have magical properties. Most humans have little to do with the khers, however, Tatters, one of the main characters it not most humans. He’s a collarbound, a mage enslaved with a magical collar that belonged to a long-dead race, although no one knows who he belongs to. Eventually we learned that’s because he belongs to the leader of The Renegades, Hawk, and escaped her clutches.

He’s been hiding safe in the city ever since. That was until a mage from his past turned up with a young woman sporting a hawk tattoo on her face. Isha was living a quiet life on a farm with her family until they were suddenly attacked one day without warning. Bit by bit she unravels the mystery of the tattoo on her face, and realises that it was put there by her mother so that she would always be able to find her. Her mother being none other than Hawk.

By the end of The Collarbound, Tatters had also worked out Isha’s identity. He has spent time with her, introducing her to the kher community, and helped her settle in when she was a newcomer. In The Hawkling as the situation with The Renegades starts to become more dire, the two of them are unsure whether they can trust each other, yet who else do they have to turn to?

While I enjoyed The Collarbound, I remember finding some of the descriptions and world-building lacking. They just didn’t feel as solid as they could be, and this was something I was mindful of when I started reading The Hawkling by Rebecca Zahabi. From the start I noticed that Zahabi’s writing in The Hawkling felt much more confident. The stage had been set in the first book, the players were known, and now we could move onto the action – and boy, did we get onto the action.

When I say action I’m not talking about massive battles; that’s not this type of series. Zahabi has set up her fantasy world around magical duels that take place in the mind, and in The Hawkling she builds upon the foundations she set up in book one. In The Collarbound we mostly just saw apprentices duelling with Tatters in the inn, and this time we get to see how the Masters do it. The level of detail in those scenes is spectacular and Zahabi skilfully brings these scenes to life as if you’re among the spectators watching the duel as it happens.

Everything is so much more refined in The Hawkling, and in a way, it makes me appreciate the way that The Collarbound was written. If Zahabi had given us more detail in the first book I don’t think the reveals in this one would have had as much impact. Instead, we were left with clues, crumbs of information that simmered away until Zahabi was ready to light the spark in The Hawkling. For all the action, The Hawking is a very slow burn with everything coming to a stunning conclusion right at the end – just in time for a cliffhanger!

If The Collarbound interested you, but you weren’t quite sure about continuing this series, I would definitely suggest picking up The Hawkling as the world and story that Zahabi is shaping is getting better and better. I’m really looking forward to the next book, The Lightborn.

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