Reviews with content warning for Blood - We Hunt the Flame

We Hunt the Flame is spell binding and magical and despite my initial challenges to adjust to Faizal's unique writing style I really enjoyed Zafira's journey. The story is told through Zafira and Nasir's third person limited point of view which allows Faizal to introduce the larger world and Nasir's complex character despite Zafira's rather limited experience beyond her own village and the Arz. Some of the things that I struggled with were related to my own preference with writing style, I just found that the shorter chapters and short sentences made it hard to motivate myself to read when I was picking up and putting it down constantly. If you don't like long winded writing then you will love this book.

Despite my qualms with the style, the overall story is beautifully told and the pacing builds Zafira into a stunning and compassionate heroine that is complex and multifaceted. This is not to say that Nasir falls flat in comparison to her in any way either, as their tale and the adventure the ultimately brings them together takes care to equally develop and pay attention to each of them as it builds. The thing that holds me back from rating this anything higher than four stars is that there were many times where I felt battles, conflicts or other challenges were resolved with a bit too little detail for my taste, some of them felt a bit too non-descript or fade-to-black so to speak. Now my opinion could very well be colored by the fact the last book I read was extremely over detailed in it's battle scene's, so take that with a grain of salt, but I believe my rating to be fair.

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caseythereader's review

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adventurous dark emotional funny mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

- WE HUNT THE FLAME has a beautifully built world and is full of descriptions that make you feel like you are there.
- The pacing was a bit slow - a lot of sitting/walking around and talking, though that may have just been misguided expectations on my part.
- Strangely, Zafira felt like the least-developed character. Everybody else on the quest had a distinct personality and backstory, but she didn't have much beyond being The Huntress (and the fact that she was obviously in love with her best friend Yasmine, why were we wasting so much time on the boys?)

Content Warnings

bookcaptivated's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

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booksthatburn's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional mysterious

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

WE HUNT THE FLAME drips with lush descriptions and evocative imagery, linked by the often scattered thoughts of two very different narrators as circumstances and a bit of a death-wish pull them inexorably closer.

I loved the setting and most of the characters. I was frequently lost in the prose of an individual moment but I find myself now able to recall the entire story, somehow whole in my mind even as the scenes sometimes felt scattered. If you’re reading this for the beautiful setting, twisting quest of a plot, and intense yearning to belong, you’ll love this. I plan to read the sequel because I want to know how this story ends. It’s literally part one of two, so a lot of stuff was left open to be handled later, but there’s a definite endpoint to the initial quest which brought everyone together.

The world-building is really really good, especially around language. The text is full of places where a word is left untranslated from the speaker's dialect (or possibly a completely different language, depending on the instance) and the point-of-view character thinks about the meaning in a way that conveys the translation. It happens a lot and helps to deepen immersion in the setting, since the the various regions having different dialects/languages is a very important part of this world.

If you’re planning on reading this because you heard it was queer, my answer is that it probably is, but I cannot predict whether you’ll be satisfied by the portrayals within.

There’s a character whose every word drips with what looks like queer longing, but the main person he’s been possibly flirting with is completely off limits for plot reasons and he knows it the whole time. There’s a woman who dresses as a man and jokes about kissing her sister of the heart, but they don’t kiss, she drops the masculine guise very early on, and she ends up with a guy. It feels either like it was heading for maximum queerness in a society which punishes women simply for existing (the male guise was necessary for the main character to feed her family), or one which describes very intense bonds but resolutely caps any possibly queer bonds at platonic, no matter how intensely they banter and stare at each other. I don’t know whether almost everyone was straight or if several key characters were bi, but the book also doesn’t provide an answer. And so I’m left with “is it queer? Yeah, probably.

Content Warnings

erinsbookshelves's review

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adventurous dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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