The Calling

Whenever faced with a lengthy book, I always wonder how the author will catch and maintain my attention. At almost 500 pages, this was surprisingly not a concern. OShea’s pacing of The Calling is balanced, feeling neither too slow nor too rushed. She ended chapters at just the right moment, and I often found myself saying, “Just one more chapter.” I was especially impressed with the balance between dialogue and narration, which moved the story along while offering insight into the characters and beautifully describing the world around them.

Perhaps my favorite aspect of this book was the perspective-taking woven throughout the story. On the one hand, the reader is faced with the viewpoint of the members of Northern Haven. They have lived below the earth’s surface for generations and have created unflattering and even dangerous narratives about the people they left behind, the Undescended. But the perspective of these Undescended is enlightening because they offer an honest and unfiltered view of what is left of humanity, and it is not a positive one. For example, they see how quickly we turn to violence to solve our disagreements and how easy it is for us to use our environment instead of coexisting with it. For me, this is what elevated this book to more than just a good story. It caused me to stop and think about the problems that exist in our world and how many of them derive from greed, anger, and the difficulty in viewing the world through another person’s experience.