Reviews with content warning for Vomit - Fire

The thing that frustrates me the most about Fire is that it’s a companion novel in the Graceling Realm and I want more story in the Dells. What a beautiful, terrifying world we have here, and I absolutely delighted in it. The Dells are dangerous and beguiling. Cashore tells the story in such a way it’s easy to be invested in all the various characters, their pursuits, and the welfare of the greater world. And our villain. There’s so much to say here folks so I’ll try to compress all my somersaulting thoughts into a few concise paragraphs.

First, the characters. Cashore does something curious here and introduces us to Leck long before we meet Fire, the primary protagonist. Through our villain, we learn about the world, and we learn about the terrible things even a child can do when given unlimited power and no moral guidance. After spending time with this villain, Fire is a relief. Her genetics make her a “monster” – equally hated and loved and always a victim to the extreme passions of others. Her personality makes her a heroine. Her perseverance makes her admirable. She’s great character to follow. In many ways, I found Fire reminiscent of Alanna from Tamora Pierce’s Lioness quartet, and that made me love her all the more.

The complexity of Fire’s emotions, motivations, and desires marks her among the most interesting characters one could have in a book. I particularly loved her internal struggle, which are subtle and important to her, but never take away from the main focus of the story: the war coming to the Dells. Both Fire’s aunt-like relationship to the young Princess Hanna and her unexpected kinship with Prince Brigan were nice to read and surprised me by ultimately forwarding the plot. Cashore always delivers in her characters. Fire is bisexual, but that doesn’t define her. The normativeness of sexual identity (outside of Fire’s father’s homophobia) was nice. It’s nice to have a fantasy world where prejudice does not perfect mirror our own. I’d also put Fire on the ace spectrum, but that is pure speculation.

Cashore uses color vibrantly to describe the Dells, and so as I read I felt the bright world unfurl around me. She’s good at shifting subtlely between senses to talk about how one place smells vs. another and shades the weather plays on a scene. It never feels flowery, and it never feels forced. Fire was a pleasure to read, and Cashore’s writing style and imagination both a gift.

I absolutely loved Fire and I know I’ll read it again, so it’s going on my list to add to my personal library. I’m so looking forward to Bitterblueeven though I know it won’t involve Fire and the Dells. Any peek into the Graceling Realm is a treasure. You don’t need to have read Graceling to enjoy Fire, so if you’re looking at a taste of Cashore’s writing and her fantasy worlds, this is the book you want. I will warn you – a simple taste won’t be enough.

Content Warnings

booksthatburn's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous dark emotional reflective slow-paced

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

5.0

FIRE is about tangled pasts, hidden things, and a girl trying to be her own person when all she sees in the mirror is her father's face.

It’s emotionally complicated in a way I wasn’t expecting, a story about how love and people are multifaceted, and that complexity means they can be kind and cruel. Fire’s memories of her father are given the space to slowly unwind, making his brutality and manipulation clear. It would be so easy to have written it like his care for her was a redeeming quality, but it’s not treated that way. In her present-day relationships, Fire is figuring out how to exist without feeling like her every action is a replica of her father’s monstrosity. The emotional journey of coming to terms with having been loved by a cruel person is a fraught one that is handled well here. It’s especially refreshing to have this topic handled in a way that has nothing to do with forgiveness or reconciliation, since her father is long dead before the story begins.

FIRE is full of secrets, dripping with them. Almost every named character (and definitely all the noble ones) either grow and change themselves, or Fire learns something about them that complicates her understanding of them. Sometimes they're new events, but more often it's something that's been true for a long time, with knock-on effects seeping into her life even when she didn't know. It works especially well in a story about a protagonist growing up and taking on both more adult responsibilities, and a more nuanced understanding of the world as her childhood understanding of things slowly cracks and shifts to incorporate more of what people are and what they can be.

This is book two in the series but chronologically takes place before the events of GRACELING. It’s well-placed here, since an explanation of some key events in FIRE would spoil a mystery central to GRACELING, but it does make my usual sequel check a bit tricky. It doesn’t wrap up anything from the first book but it does supply some backstory for an important character. The entire plot starts here and wasn’t part of GRACELING, and many things are both introduced and resolved in FIRE. It doesn’t specifically leave anything open to be addressed later, but it’s my guess that some of these characters will appear later in the series. The narrator is different from GRACELING, and she feels like a very different person than the previous narrator. This would mostly make sense if read without having read the first book, but both books would suffer in the telling if FIRE is originally read without a central bit of knowledge and then GRACELING is later read for the first time with that information.

This is a great book and a worthy sequel, continuing GRACELING's themes of secrets and damage in a whole new kingdom and (almost) entirely new cast.

Content Warnings

marieketron's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous dark emotional medium-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I read Fire very closely after Graceling this time, but I still prefer Fire ever so slightly even though I noticed a ew more things I enjoyed less this time around. The main characters of the two novels, Katsa and Fire, are similar in that they are both extremely forthright, open, and specific about what they think and feel, even when they don't know what it is exactly that they are feeling. I think I preferred Fire because her environment resembles more closely our modern rape culture - exacerbated by her unnatural beauty. On top of that, she is learning throughout the course of the book to stand up for herself and set boundaries, even with those people she loves the most, which is a hard but important thing to do that I can relate with.

This time around I did notice that there are a Lot of dead mothers in this book. Of course there are dead fathers as well, but they mostly held important political positions and / or were present to raise their children, neither of which applies to all the dead mothers. I would have loved to have seen more older women besides Roen and Tess. On a more personal preference, I felt there was a bit too much plot in this story regarding the conspiracies and factions and general court intrigue, which was compounded by the presence of Leck. On this re-read I pretty much skimmed through the plot-heavy bits.

The main romance is one of my favourites in any work of fiction, as is the case for Katsa and Po. I don't necessarily rank one above the other, but I like that both pairings went on a road trip where they spent a significant amount of time with each other as well as in a castle where they keep running into each other. I'm a sucker for the involuntary road trip as a tool for character development and it worked really well in both cases.

3rd reading: the age gap of the older men falling in love with younger girls is a bit creepy for being such a consistent pattern

Content Warnings

More...