Fire (Cashore)

4/5. So I thought Cashore's first book, Graceling, was pleasant enough for me to pick this one up from the library, but not more than that. This book, I quite liked.

I also had the feeling while reading it that this was the book Cashore actually intended to write when she wrote Graceling, as in many ways it functions as a Graceling clone. Awesome female heroine who can dance circles around the men, check. Said heroine angsts About Her Powers And Using Them For Evil, check. Possessive, emotionally-clueless would-be boyfriend, check. Not-so-clueless-equal-partner romantic lead, check. Cute kid, check. Except that the execution of all the above is far better technically than in Graceling. Cashore has learned a lot since that book.

In particular, Graceling had a very limited set of relationships; several months after reading it, I cannot remember any of them except the major love interest and the would-be love interest (and the kid, a little) and their relationship to the heroine. But Fire is all about the relationships, familial and friendship and romantic all three, and not just the relationships involving Fire herself; and a major focus of the book is how Fire grows as a person through her participation and growth in those relationships. It says something about Fire that many of the most compelling relationships in it are not the romantic ones, including the relationships powering what (to me) was the most intense scene.

Also the plot was more interesting. Honestly, the plot was still a bit of a weak point, not least because this is the second book in a series, so there's the whole "we have to at least loosely tie it to the first book even if it holds up the action" thing, but at least there was a plot besides "big bad: go!"

It also reminded me very much of what I wanted the last book of the Hunger Games trilogy to be. Mild spoilers: Fire spends the first, oh, two-thirds of the book getting crushed down. That is, around the same fraction of the time Katniss is crushed down. They both have Issues resulting from this. And Fire fights back (partially because of that support network referred to above), whereas Katniss sits around moping (her support network mostly being dead at that point, I guess?). Not saying that sitting around moping isn't what someone in that situation would actually do, but it's just not interesting to read about, and I also don't find people without meaningful relationships interesting to read about as a rule. Fire was interesting.

Also, interesting stuff about reproductive choices. If I remember correctly, Katsa didn't want marriage or reproduction; Fire doesn't want (5-25-12 EDIT: this should be DOES WANT) marriage, but has very good reasons pulling her in both directions as regards reproduction. And I really liked that the text engaged with the fact that there are reasons both ways, and one can feel a strong pull in one direction without nullifying the reasons in the other directions.

(Also see lightreads's review (grr link fixed), which I had to go back and hunt for after reading, and which I found quite interesting.)

So. I won't say it was perfect (there were still places here and there where it was a bit unsure of itself, or things didn't flow quite the way I'd have expected from a more experienced author, and although the beginning is light-years better than Graceling's it's still somewhat clunky), and you do have to read Graceling first unless you want to be mildly spoiled for it, but I do recommend it. I am really interested to see what Cashore does next, and I will definitely be picking up anything else she writes.

One more thing: julianyap reminds me that this is to be classified under heroine-hair-color: red.