Thursday, May 17, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Fire Dance by Ilana C. Myer




Fire Dance is the sequel to Ilana C Myer's first novel, Last Song Before Night (which I reviewed a long time ago back on twitter here and actually did a spoiler filled review on my blog HERE).  I've seen it advertised as a "stand-alone" sequel not requiring prior knowledge, but I would strongly advise against starting the series with this book - i suspect a reader doing so will be incredibly lost.*  Fire Dance follows up with what comes next for the main heroine of LSBN in addition to introducing a number of new protagonists to follow, and as a result half of the book relies quite a lot of background introduced in the first book.

*Obviously, having read LSBN, I can't judge this perfectly well, but really I can't imagine trying to start this book before LSBN.

 The other reason you should start with Last Song Before Night is that it's a much better book than Fire Dance, which frankly disappointed me quite a bit.  I loved Last Song Before Night, as an epic fantasy story with beautiful writing, excellent characters, and a dark (often REALLY dark) plot that was haunting at times yet satisfying.  Myer's prose remains excellent and the story is beautifully written, but while Fire Dance introduces many intriguing new characters it doesn't spend enough time with any of them to have them really make an impact, unlike its predecessor, and its plot is an utter mess.  The book is shorter than its predecessor but seemingly tries to pack in twice as many plots, and ends in a way that just doesn't satisfy (and leaves some massive cliffhangers).

More after the Jump:

---------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------
When Eivar's neighboring kingdom begins to suffer strange powerful attacks from the people known as "fire dancers," the King sends for Eivar's new Court Poet, Lin Amaristoth.  But Lin has a secret - as part of her quest to regain the powers of Eivar's poets' enchantments, Lin took in the spirit of a long-dead legendary Poet, and her body cannot hold the two spirits for long.....she is dying.  Taking her trusted ally, Ned Alterra, with her to the foreign kingdom however, she soon discovers that the secrets of the magic behind Eivar's neighbors are more deadly than she could have known....and that no one is more potentially treacherous than the mysterious Queen.

Meanwhile, back in Eivar, the Academy known for its training of poets is coming to grips with the return of the Poets' magic enchantments.  There, young Julien, one of the Academy's first three female students, simply seeks to find her place in an academy that wants no part of her, and a young man named Dorn simply wishes to be a singer, without having to deal with the added responsibilities of magic.  But their existences at the academy are disturbed when one of the Arch Masters dies and is replaced by the mysterious Elissan Diar, who is known for traveling around collecting magics from throughout the world, and his mysterious daughter.  Diar has more sinister plans for the academy and young poets in his inner circle keep mysteriously leaving the academy....

New Magic fills Eivar and without, and with it consequences that will change the world...
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Like Last Song Before Night, Fire Dance features a beautifully described world by Myer with some excellent worldbuilding.  The magic in this world is incredibly varied and well described to form a beautiful if often incredibly dark in tone world. The new characters all show incredible promise, particularly Dorn and Julien and I'd like to read more of them. Dorn in particularly is such a lovely subversion that makes total sense - the singer/poet who doesn't want anything to do with the magic that surrounds those worlds - that I really wanted more of him.

And that's the main problem with Fire Dance - it has plenty of plotlines I was interested in and wanted more of, and nowhere near enough space for them all.  The book resorts to alternating between the plots at the academy and the chapters with Lin every few chapters, which just left me not really able to enjoy either plotline, since as soon as it might get good, we'd leave it.  This was problematic with both storylines - for the Academy storyline, it made it hard to really enjoy the new characters as much as I wanted to since we kept leaving them (the main antagonist's daughter seems interesting at one point for example, and then essentially is dropped as important without any reason after a few chapters with the other storyline).  For Lin's storyline, it well....there's a lot of things going on in that storyline, with a lot of different moving parts, and I'll admit to getting pretty confused as to which actors were working with or against different parties, and constantly leaving that storyline to go elsewhere did not help in this respect.  The book essentially lost me, which is a problem.

It doesn't help that the main antagonist is paper-thin evil and not very interesting.  Last Song Before Night also had a similar main villain, but it possessed a really interesting (and really evil) secondary villain which this book lacks.  The book has moments of darkness like its predecessor, but it never really comes together to make the same hauntingly dark feeling that I got from Last Song Before Night.

The ending also didn't really work for me.  Fire Dance attempts to satisfy its readers by concluding a more personal plot in its ending, while leaving the greater scope conflict open for the next book.  It's a type of ending that I've seen work before - Stina Leicht's Blackthorne is a good example (though even there I had mixed feelings about it)- but it doesn't work here due to the book's lack of focus on that particular plot, leaving me rather cold to the ending.

I'll read the final book in this trilogy, because of how good the first book was.  But I absolutely cannot recommend Fire Dance to anyone who didn't love Last Song Before Night, and even then I suspect many a reader would be disappointed.  The best thing to advertise this book is the beautiful prose, but the book doesn't have enough time to develop the characters or plotlines to make that worth it.
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