Book #62 of 2015:

Fire by Kristin Cashore (Graceling Realm #2)

Just like its predecessor in this series, I have mixed feelings about Fire. There’s a lot it does right, including foregrounding gender discrimination issues in an organic way throughout the plot. But there’s so much falling action, with a good 20% of the book happening after the main villain has been dispatched. Part of that is the end of a war that feels perfunctory since we never got to know the enemy, but even after the fighting is done, the book still keeps plodding along.

And okay, maybe this is nitpicky, but here’s never any justification given for why the main character’s name is the word Fire – nearly every other character in the book has either a “normal” real-life name like Clara or Hanna or a more traditional-sounding fantasy name like Cansrel or Brigan. The one exception is Fire’s friend Archer, which is even more maddening: we’re told that Archer is a nickname for Arklin based on his skill at archery, but then throughout the first half of the book there’s a recurring threat of another mysterious archer who keeps popping up and causing trouble. This other figure isn’t named, so you have conversations mentioning both “Archer” and “the archer” over and over again. It’s not all that confusing per se, but it is sloppy writing.

Also: I’m unconvinced that “monster” was the appropriate label for the sort of person/creature Fire is. There are clear connotations that come with using a real word like that for a fictional construct (unlike the “graceling” term that Cashore introduces in the previous novel), and the narrative never really engages with those connotations to interrogate or subvert them. Does Fire think of herself as a monster as we understand the word? Do other people in the kingdom of the Dells see her as monstrous? It’s unclear. In fact, the moral implications of Fire’s monster powers over other people are never really scrutinized to my satisfaction, although the narrative does come close several times. (The terminology is also inconsistent: in addition to Fire and her father, there are repeated mentions of raptor monsters and monster bugs, with no indication about why these names are not parallel.)

All in all, I came away from Fire with about the same reaction I had to Graceling: this was an adequate but deeply flawed novel, enjoyable and frustrating in roughly equal measure.

★★★☆☆

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