THE HAWK'S MESSAGE

In this second middle-grade novel in a series, a girl learns more about her shared destiny with a hawk.

Claire, who’s nearly 12, moved to a small town in Pennsylvania six months ago. She’s always had a long-standing, special connection with birds, but it deepened after she met Jerry, a 71-year-old Earth wizard and Guardian of the Woods. Through him, she discovered that her fate is bound to that of Ku-Khain, a female red-tailed hawk. Jerry believes that Claire must learn to enter the Now, a spiritual state “outside of time and space,” to receive a message from Ku-Khain, and although he insists that entering the Now is “as natural as breathing,” Claire doubts herself. Billionaire ornithologist Robert Crawley dreams of adding the nearly extinct ivory-billed woodpecker to his life list of personally identified birds, so Claire offers her special help (“Jerry says I keep birds in my heart and that makes them come to me”). Crawley takes Claire and two of her friends, Victor and Billy,with him on an expedition to find the woodpecker in White River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas, where the bird was last seen. Although not everything goes as planned, Claire moves further along in her spiritual journey. As in the previous volume, An Odd Bird (2020), Butler draws well-informed connections with environmental issues. This sequel presents Claire with several obstacles that tie in nicely with her age, such as the fact that she has a distracting crush on the ornithologist. Similarly, Claire isn’t an automatic virtuoso but is appropriately fledglinglike in how she tries to master her abilities. A few narrative obstacles feel contrived, though, as when Butler withholds important information for flimsy reasons. The prose style can also be awkward at times, as when the author uses the word jettison to mean jump or employs belabored descriptions: “ ‘I have to go!’ she whined, linking her strange behavior to a biological urgency.”

A diverting combination of ecology and spirituality, despite a few snags.