I'm not super great at writing summaries so I'm going to defer to Goodreads:
Fire, Graceling's prequel-ish companion book, takes place across the mountains to the east of the seven kingdoms, in a rocky, war-torn land called the Dells.
Beautiful creatures called monsters live in the Dells. Monsters have the shape of normal animals: mountain lions, dragonflies, horses, fish. But the hair or scales or feathers of monsters are gorgeously colored-- fuchsia, turquoise, sparkly bronze, iridescent green-- and their minds have the power to control the minds of humans.
Seventeen-year-old Fire is the last remaining human-shaped monster in the Dells. Gorgeously monstrous in body and mind but with a human appreciation of right and wrong, she is hated and mistrusted by just about everyone, and this book is her story.
Wondering what makes it a companion book/prequel? Fire takes place 30-some years before Graceling and has one cross-over character with Graceling, a small boy with strange two-colored eyes who comes from no-one-knows-where, and who has a peculiar ability that Graceling readers will find familiar and disturbing...
Janssen got an ARC of Fire because she has secret ninja channels that allow her to get the year's most anticipated books early and then she shares them. Because she's awesome like that.
This book was 461 pages and I finished it in well under 24 hours. It was just. that. good. I really enjoyed Graceling but you could kind of tell it was a freshman effort. The story was great but had a few pacing problems and I had a couple nitpicky issues with the writing. And then Kristin Cashore all went and grew up on us and that stuff was remedied in Fire and the whole thing just flowed so much better.
Also, a lot of people have mentioned this, but this book is just so pretty. I read an interview with the author somewhere and she gave mad props to her cover person because, seriously. PRETTY.
Also, fair warning: everyone in this book is having sex (in an "off screen" sort of way) and the relationships are all crazy and you will need a flow chart to figure out who is related to who in name and who is related to who by blood because those things are frequently different.
Overall, I give it an AWESOME.
2 comments:
I have read like four different "official" summaries of this book and they're ALL different. ARGH.
Also, I don't remember the non-human monsters having mind control powers. . .but it keeps showing up in the summaries. Am I an idiot?
Yup, the animals could do it too. Remember they had Fire teaching kids and whatnot how to guard their minds against monsters because the animals could get in too to certain extents. She didn't really talk about that much though, so we don't know what exactly they could DO, just that you had to mentally guard against them.
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