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kohlsamanda 's review for:
We Hunt the Flame
by Hafsah Faizal
I read this, enjoyed it enough, but immediately had to read a summary of the plot to truly understand what happened at a deep level.
Basically, six people travel to a mysterious island to try and release the magic trapped there. But, shocker, they all have slightly different motivations and goals that must be put aside as they band together as a team to attempt to defeat a Big Bad. The characters are all fairly well-developed, and none of them are very happy people, but it all works fairly well. Nothing too different from other YA books, but this has a Middle Eastern/Asian setting.
I'd say that the only complaint about character development that really stuck with me was that one of the characters was killed off fairly early and I didn't think there was enough mourning/processing of that. Instead it was sort of, "Okay, well that was sad but let's still join forces" which felt unnatural and childish compared to the depth of the rest of the book. Other than that, the characters all had a bit of background and some reasoning behind their actions, which is solid for a YA book.
One thing that struck me was that the writing was much more elevated than I expected for a book tagged as YA. It isn't that there's a high vocabulary, but there are a lot of new words thrown in without a lot of explanation and I had to do some juggling to figure out where we were, what was happening, what everyone was feeling, etc. Sometimes I pick up YA just to not have to think *quite* as hard with my fantasy, so I was surprised.
There is no doubt that the author was incredibly talented, and I would go as far as to put this in the "high fantasy" category because of the extremely intricate world that was built. I think I just wasn't prepared for it, which is why I struggled to keep up a bit. But knowing what I know now, I am well prepared to dive into the second.
Basically, six people travel to a mysterious island to try and release the magic trapped there. But, shocker, they all have slightly different motivations and goals that must be put aside as they band together as a team to attempt to defeat a Big Bad. The characters are all fairly well-developed, and none of them are very happy people, but it all works fairly well. Nothing too different from other YA books, but this has a Middle Eastern/Asian setting.
I'd say that the only complaint about character development that really stuck with me was that one of the characters was killed off fairly early and I didn't think there was enough mourning/processing of that. Instead it was sort of, "Okay, well that was sad but let's still join forces" which felt unnatural and childish compared to the depth of the rest of the book. Other than that, the characters all had a bit of background and some reasoning behind their actions, which is solid for a YA book.
One thing that struck me was that the writing was much more elevated than I expected for a book tagged as YA. It isn't that there's a high vocabulary, but there are a lot of new words thrown in without a lot of explanation and I had to do some juggling to figure out where we were, what was happening, what everyone was feeling, etc. Sometimes I pick up YA just to not have to think *quite* as hard with my fantasy, so I was surprised.
There is no doubt that the author was incredibly talented, and I would go as far as to put this in the "high fantasy" category because of the extremely intricate world that was built. I think I just wasn't prepared for it, which is why I struggled to keep up a bit. But knowing what I know now, I am well prepared to dive into the second.