Fire

Y'all I don't know??? What happened????

The first book in this series, Graceling, is one of my favorites. It was one of the first YA fantasy books that I got my hands on in that 2007-2010 haze when I wanted to devour anything and everything with a paranormal element. Typically when I look back on the books I loved during that period, I know I'd feel somewhere on the scale of ‘meh' to ‘BURN IT WITH FIRE' about them if I read them now. But you know what? I reread Graceling a little over a year ago, and I still loved it. Does part of that probably have to do with nostalgia? Hell yeah. But I do think it holds up really well. It was one of the first books that made me realize how legitimately great YA could be, how important Strong Female Characters™ are to me, how delightful it is when their male romantic partners don't completely take away their agency.

It's not that those things were missing in Fire, they just didn't have the same...um...fire that Graceling did. There were pieces of Cashore's feminism in this book, as there was in Graceling. Fire calls out her friend-with-benefits for being an overprotective misogynist. (The fact that a female character has a friend-with-benefits in a YA book at all is honestly great; the fact that he falls in love with her and completely smothers her is not so great.) Fire's actual love interest doesn't smother her and respects her agency. But.

But.

The entire concept of this book revolves around Fire being a “monster”—someone with staggering beauty and the ability to read and control minds. She's a good monster, unlike her father, and she only uses her powers for self-defense. Which she needs to do a lot, actually, because men are vile and whenever they see her they can't help but 1. want to kill her 2. want to rape her, because her beauty is just SO OVERWHELMING. There are men who can and do control this urge, by working very hard at learning to block her from their minds. Maybe this whole concept was meant to be a commentary on men in society. See! They can control themselves if and when they feel like it! But to me, it just came off as an excuse: boys will be boys, it's in their nature to desire control and power over women, especially beautiful women. I really do think Cashore was attempting the former, not the latter, but I just felt so thoroughly uncomfortable with this concept, and it was not something I wanted to read about. Maybe it just hit too close to the current state of the sociopolitical atmosphere.

Mainly, I just found Fire dreadfully boring. I didn't care about the characters, the relationships, the world-building, or the plot, which was such a deviation from how I felt about Graceling. Maybe my expectations were way too high for a book that was really more of a companion to Graceling rather than a sequel. But still, I think the comparison is fair.

I didn't hate it, but I definitely “Did Not Like It,” 1 Star, Goodreads.com.