Book Review – A Promise of Fire (Amanda Bouchet)
I’ve been reading a lot in the last few weeks. I like to call it ‘market research,’ but honestly, it’s more pleasure than business. I’ve been particularly focusing on young adult, and when I read the blurb for Amanda Bouchet’s A Promise of Fire, it seemed to fit the bill. Courtesy of Goodreads:
KINGDOMS WILL RISE AND FALL FOR HER…
BUT NOT IF SHE CAN HELP IT
Catalia “Cat” Fisa lives disguised as a soothsayer in a traveling circus. She is perfectly content avoiding the danger and destiny the Gods-and her homicidal mother-have saddled her with. That is, until Griffin, an ambitious warlord from the magic-deprived south, fixes her with his steely gaze and upsets her illusion of safety forever.
Griffin knows Cat is the Kingmaker, the woman who divines the truth through lies. He wants her as a powerful weapon for his newly conquered realm-until he realizes he wants her for much more than her magic. Cat fights him at every turn, but Griffin’s fairness, loyalty, and smoldering advances make him increasingly hard to resist and leave her wondering if life really does have to be short, and lived alone.
Seems to be ticking all the young adult fantasy boxes. Plucky heroine with potential mummy issues. Growing romance with steely-gazed, muscle-bound male. Threat of magic-fuelled, world-ending catastrophe. I was particularly intrigued by the ‘heroine disguises herself in traveling wagon’ angle, because of the obvious Price of Magic connection. It’s a good place to hide, right? Wandering from town to town, no fixed address—seems like it would be hard for your enemies to find you even if they did know where to look.
Of course, when I started actually reading the book, it became apparent that this wasn’t strictly a ‘young adult’ book. There’s a whole lot of, er, shall we say, steamy content. More on that later. Possibly this book fits under ‘new adult,’ that ambiguous middle ground between young adult and regular adult. But this definitely isn’t a story for your fourteen-year-olds.
Some minor spoilers below, nothing earth-shattering:
A Promise of Fire is set in a fantasy world, but the above-mentioned gods are recognisable from Greek myth. Coming off six years of high school Latin and a low-key obsession with Xena: Warrior Princess, I appreciated the Greek angle. You don’t see it much in fantasy these days—possibly authors are scared of ripping off Percy Jackson. Bouchet did a good job here, although I would have liked to see the gods feature a little more prominently. I assume they play a bigger role in the next two books.
The part I was less keen on: the romance. Eep. This is a little bit my fault, because I can see now that Amazon has classified this book as primarily Romance > Fantasy. I guess it’s not surprising that the romance component was so in-your-face. There was a lot of soulful staring and fluttering hearts and heat surging through various parts of the body. A whole lot, even when romance should probably have been the last thing on these characters’ minds. I prefer the love story, if there is one, to be the icing, but here it was pretty much the entire cake. If you stripped away the romance here, you would pretty much just be left with a novella. Still, some people dig that, so I don’t know if I can really flag it as a negative—more a matter of personal taste.
The male lead was likeable enough, but it has to be said: a kidnapping as the prelude to romance is…troubling. As nice and caring and protective as he was, this is still the guy who abducted our protagonist, tied her up with magic rope, threatened her friends with murder, and blithely endangered her life. On the plus side, the protagonist Cat herself was a great character without veering into Mary Sue territory. She’s brash, petulant, calculating and kind of a brat, and it works! Her narrative voice was engaging, even with all the gahs and the not really, yes reallyies. I do feel like she was somewhat overpowered, which is worrying for book one in a trilogy. Okay, so she has the unique and coveted ability to detect lies… and she can turn invisible… and she can absorb magic (which is a whole superpower in itself, because it encompasses fire breathing and healing and immunity to magic and I think there was some mind control in there too? It’s a lot.) While I like reading about magically powerful protagonists, in this instance it deflated the tension a little. Despite several near-death experiences, I was never convinced that Cat was in genuine danger. Threats (mostly in the form of nameless goons) are neutralised pretty much as soon as they appear, and the only real risk seems to come from Cat over-exerting herself. I would have preferred to see her squaring off against someone closer to her own power level, if such a person even exists.
With all that said, I don’t regret reading this book. The prose style was clear, the story moves along at a brisk clip, and the characters are basically likeable. The central premise was interesting enough to hold my attention. And while I’m not racing to the store to buy Book 2, I probably will pick it up at some point.
Maybe.
Probably.
Gah!
Overall, a solid three and a half stars.