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A review by justabean_reads
Fire Song by Adam Garnet Jones
dark
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
Originally a movie, then novelised by the filmmaker: the story follows a queer teen living on a (fictional) Anishinaabe reserve in northern Ontario. Our hero has a boyfriend who's deep in the closet, a girlfriend he hasn't informed is mostly a beard, a sister who's just committed suicide, a mom who's emotionally checked out, a house that's rotting around him, a drinking problem, and not much hope that he's going to get to go to college in Toronto.
The book leans so hard into bleak that it dragged as one terrible thing after another happened to make the hero's life more hopeless, and the pull up to a bittersweet ending didn't feel especially earned. I also felt like though the author tried to give the female characters some kind of voice, they didn't have a lot of agency, and it had something of the feeling that bad things happened to them to further the hero's angst, not their own stories.
I think this was probably a better movie. In film, the narrative would have been given a bit more speed, and a bit less time for the viewer to feel like this was turning into a sadness wallow. (Or to go, "Oh, come on!" at plot developments.) But I haven't seen it, so maybe not.
The book leans so hard into bleak that it dragged as one terrible thing after another happened to make the hero's life more hopeless, and the pull up to a bittersweet ending didn't feel especially earned. I also felt like though the author tried to give the female characters some kind of voice, they didn't have a lot of agency, and it had something of the feeling that bad things happened to them to further the hero's angst, not their own stories.
I think this was probably a better movie. In film, the narrative would have been given a bit more speed, and a bit less time for the viewer to feel like this was turning into a sadness wallow. (Or to go, "Oh, come on!" at plot developments.) But I haven't seen it, so maybe not.