Friday, September 22, 2017

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Call of Fire (Blood of Earth #2) by Beth Cato


Call of Fire is the sequel to Breath of Earth and thus second in Cato's Blood of Earth series (which is listed on the author's website as a trilogy, but I wouldn't be surprised if it goes longer for reasons discussed below).  It's not a stand alone book in any shape or form, as it continues the story directly from Breath of Earth and ends on several major cliffhangers.  If you enjoyed Blood of Earth a lot, you'll like this book, as it's a lot of the same.  If, like me, you enjoyed Blood of Earth a bit but found it short of breaking into being truly great, you might be a little underwhelmed by Call of Fire.

Call of Fire continues the story of Ingrid Carmichael as she attempts to discover more about who and what she is and how she and her friends can save the World before a seemingly power-mad Japanese Kitsune finishes her genocide against the Chinese and destroys America for her own nebulous purposes.  Again, this is an alternate history in which the magic and magical creatures exist, where (steampunk-esque) technology is largely driven by earth-magic contained in magical stones, and where a Japanese-American alliance ended the Civil War and resulted in a major influence of Japan on American life.

More after the Jump (Spoilers for Breath of Earth in the Plot Summary)

---------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------
With San Francisco in ruins thanks to the powers of Ingrid Carmichael's father, Ingrid, Cy, Lee, and Fenris find themselves on the run from the dangerous Kitsune Ambassador Blum.  Onboard their airship, they first find themselves in Portland, where they try to find out if they can find what happened to Ingrid's surrogate father Mr. Sakaguchi and the Chinese who fled San Francisco.  But when the airship is hijacked with Lee and Fenris aboard, Ingrid and Cy are forced to turn to the aid of the American Ambassador Theodore Roosevelt.  But how much can they trust him?

Eventually Ingrid and Cy will find themselves in Seattle and will learn more about Ingrid's past and abilities as well as the truth about her father and his heritage.  But when Blum tracks them down, will they be able to find a way to escape with their lives?  And is there any way for them to stop her, between the power of her Ambassador ring and her Kitsune magic?
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Call of Fire is certainly far from predictable in many ways.  This is a story which seems to take it for a given that fantastical creatures from multiple different mythologies/cultures can come into play, and well, they will do exactly that, which spices things up a bit.  Ingrid herself remains an interesting character whose powers and motivations feel real.  Similarly, for the short time he's in this book, Fenris is also still interesting.  And then there's Teddy Roosevelt, whose appearance in this book is a fun mix of his real life background and the fantastical elements of this world.

That said....there's a lot of issues with this book.  Overall it's fine...but it just seems blah at times for many reasons.  Lee remains uninteresting as a character who isn't really developed (since a lot of his activity remains offscreen and his relationship with Ingrid is more told than seen) and Cy is kind of blah as a love interest in this one (whereas he was better in the first book), basically taking a total passive role.  And those are half of our main characters!  Fenris remains the best of the non-Ingrid main characters, and his role is the smallest plot wise.

But I suspect the big one is related to my point about fantastical creatures above - this book is trying to do WAY too many things at once, and doesn't take any of them far enough to be interesting on their own.  We have spirits and fantastical creatures of many kinds, that just pop up when needed but don't really add much to the plot or have any character of their own.  We take trips here to Portland and Seattle, but there's basically nothing in this book that couldn't be set somewhere else with any loss whatsoever (the most Seattle-specific thing in this book is the nearby existence of Mt. Rainier, and well you could swap it out with some other city with a nearby volcano).  We also have minor bad guys pop up from Russia (in addition to the last book's minor bad guys from India) to distract from the main bad guys (who are Japanese).

The book wants to have its major focus on the fantastical retelling of the horrible treatment of the Chinese on the west coast in the early 20th century, but well, doesn't spend enough time actually with the Chinese or in Chinatown to really show that.  There's inklings of a potential interesting plot about what the Chinese have to do to survive/return to prominence in this universe and whether certain steps are going too far, but the book never commits to this theme and puts it on the backburner for large stretches of the time. It's a shame because it's the most unique thing about this book (and the author's discussion of her research into the topic on Scalzi's blog is how I found out about this series).
Again, this book isn't bad.  It's a fine plot with some fine characters, albeit some who are cliches and without doing much super interesting.  There's nothing offensive here and nothing in the plot angered me or made me really annoyed like some books I've disliked.  But it just does so much less than I hoped for with the setup and that's a disappointment.  Again, supposedly from the author's website, this is a trilogy, but I have no idea who the author is planning on wrapping things up in one more book.  As such, I'll probably be bowing out of this series for now and not finishing it because either it'll be more than one book and won't be worth my investment or it'll be one final book longer and I don't trust the author to be able to wrap all the threads up in a way that is satisfactory as to any of them.




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