Hawk & Sparrow by Ayana Gray
An inventor unveils a wooden box on a museum stage. Type in a prompt, flip a switch, and a ribbon of paper comes out with a magic spell printed on it. Anyone can read it aloud. Anyone at all. In the audience, a sorcerer who has spent nine years learning that language watches a man who has spent none of them conjure a dragon out of the room’s candle flames, and his face does something complicated. Two hours later the inventor is dead in a hedge maze. Hawk & Sparrow by Ayana Gray opens with one of the sharpest premises in this year’s young adult fantasy, and then spends three hundred pages deciding what to do with it. Where Hawk & Sparrow Sits on Ayana Gray’s Shelf Gray built her name on the Beasts of Prey trilogy, then wrote I, Medusa for adults. This is a different animal from either: a Gilded Age secondary world, a locked-city murder, a fake courtship, and a heroine who solves things by noticing them. The comparison most readers will …
