Thursday, October 3, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Tell the Wind and Fire by Sarah Rees Brennan




Tell the Wind and Fire is a modern fantasy* YA take on A Tale of Two Cities (by Charles Dickens) by YA Fantasy author Sarah Rees Brennan.  In what may surprise you, I've never actually read A Tale of Two Cities, so this review will not be able tot address how this works as an adaptation.  However, I've been a fan of Brennan's ever since I read her utterly fantastic "In Other Lands" and then moved on to her Demon's Lexicon series, so I definitely was excited to give this a try despite my lack of background.

*I've said this before, but I define "Modern Fantasy" as a story taking place in a modern-esque setting with fantastical elements as compared to "Urban Fantasy" which also takes place in a modern world but one in which fantastical elements and creatures from fantasy stories are commonplace throughout - so most usually magical creatures and the like are present either openly or secretly but in such frequency to be a major part of the setting.  It's a definition of the subgenres that's really without meaning but I don't think "urban fantasy" gives the right impression for this book.

And as a stand-alone book, adaptation issues aside, Tell the Wind and Fire is a really strong book with a fascinating lead character and excellent setting that I'd definitely recommend.  The book suffers from occasional overwriting and an early info-dump, but these issues are only mildly annoying, and the depth that's built into the characters and setting from beginning to its very strong ending is impressive to say the least.

Note:  I read this as an audiobook, and the reader is excellent, especially at differentiating the voices and tones between several characters who are essentially identical twins.


-----------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
The discovery of Light and Dark Magic in the world had drastic effects on the cities in which people lived.  Light magic is far more common to be found among people and useful, but overuse of Light Magic can result in the magic burning up the mage from the inside out.....unless the Light Magician can find a Dark Magician to drain their blood.  That dependence upon Dark Magicians, as well as the fact that Dark Magicians are fueled by the blood of others, has led to the Light Magicians oppressing the Dark, sealing away most Dark Magicians, and their families and loved ones, inside so-called "Dark Cities" walled off from the rest of their cities, under hard conditions - lack of food, mistreatment by guards, etc.

Lucie Manette is well aware of the pain and agony of living in the Dark - she spent the first fifteen years of her life there in the Dark City of New York City, until she used her Life Magic and a bit of a performance to get her and her father out.  Lucie did it all for her father, and feels tremendously guilty over the secrets she keeps, and the family she feels she betrayed when she left the Dark City.  But Lucie justifies herself privately by saying she simply wants to survive with the ones she loves, namely her father and her boyfriend Ethan.

But when it turns out Ethan has a doppelganger, a dark magician duplicate named Carwyn, it seems that Lucie hasn't quite escaped the Dark after all.  And when the forces of the Dark City begin to rise up, using Lucie's image as a symbol, Lucie will find both herself and the ones she loves threatened once again, and she will be forced to make hard choices to try and save them....only this time, it may be impossible to save them all......
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Tell the Wind and Fire is told from the perspective of Lucie, a young woman with Light Magic whose past life in the Dark, and the things that she did to get out of it, made her a symbol that the powerful in both cities want to wield for themselves.  Lucie is our prime character in this story, with the story more interested in how she reacts to the changes in the Light and Dark Cities of New York than necessarily how others perceive and cause those changes, although the actions and reactions that occur all are used to further the themes of the book (more on that below).

This works really well because Lucie is a fascinating lead character, one who doesn't quite follow the archetypes for heroes or heroines pretty much at all.  Lucie's desire throughout the book is to survive, and to help her most loved ones do so as well, and not anything else.  She has no interest in revolution, and believes that the system cannot change and that to try and cause such changes will only result in pain and failure.  And for all of this, Lucy calls herself a coward, even evil.  Her actions to save her father resulted in her denying her mother and denying the rest of the innocents harmed in the Dark, leaving them behind still in fear and pain.  As things get worse throughout the book, that mentality remains - this is not a book where Lucie will ever be jumping at the call of revolution or moving to take a stand for a greater cause - Lucie is who she is, and what that is is being a person who will try to help herself and the ones she loves, in the midst of a world that seems only willing to harm them.  It makes the plot a personal one as things move on grand scales, and takes things in directions that surprised me as a result, being conditioned to expect a hero turn somewhere that the book has no interest in taking.

Again, Tell the Wind and Fire is an adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities, just with the setting changed from the French Revolution to a magical version of modern New York City.  My knowledge of the Dickens' novel is mainly from wikipedia, so I won't be able to judge how well the book adapts Dickens' work, but I can say just from the wikipedia summary that the book does echo quite clearly a number of plot points, so readers more familiar with Dickens' work than I will very likely be able to see where certain plot twists are going.  As I didn't even wikipedia the Dickens' work until after completing this work, I was more than a bit surprised at how the plot twisted and turned but all of these plot twists and turns really worked, from beginning to end.

And the story that this book is telling is one of oppression and hatred, and the ways that such actions lead only to further cycles of oppression and hatred in the name of "justice", seemingly on and on forever, just with the parties doing the oppressing changing from time to time.  Both sides of the Light and Dark Cities have dangerous antagonists, who fear and hate the others and act in horrible fashion in the name of justice, security, and vengeance.  Brennan uses the interplay between Light and Dark Magic to demonstrate the chilling natures of how these seemingly sometimes laudable goals lead to devastation and horrors, while ending on a chilling note that gives a grim slight hope that some day, the cycle of horrors will end.  In the meantime, people like Lucie will have to protect themselves and their loved ones, to ensure they are all there when things finally change for the better.  It's a bittersweet - at BEST - ending, but one that works really damn well.

Which is not to say that everything in this book really works.  This is a minor deal, but it bugs me: I'm not sure why the book is set in New York City, when the cities are pretty much generic with the exception of a few references to NYC geography that don't make much difference at all (it's not even clear where the boundaries between the Light and Dark cities are for example) - and the Dark City revolutionary group is called the sans-merci, which makes no sense for an organization in New York as opposed to Paris.

More significantly, the book is a bit overwritten at times, with an early chapter being an incredibly clear exposition-dump, and the book spending just a bit too long on quite a few occasions going over Lucie's mental state as she deals with the ramifications of her actions and the actions of those around her.  For example, in one of the final ones of these sequences, I was yelling in my car at the audiobook reader because her spiraling thoughts seemed to go on FOREVER when her eventual decision had already been clear for minutes of audiobook reading already.  Brennan does an excellent job making all of these thoughts of Lucie count and matter, and making you care for Lucie and Lucie's friends/family, so the overwriting isn't something that detracts too much from the book, and probably wouldn't be as noticeable in ebook/print form as in an audiobook, but in the audiobook it is noticeable and more than a little bit annoying.

But yeah, overall, Tell the Wind and Fire is an excellent book, taking the framework of Dickens' classic, adding a fantasy touch of magic, and refocusing the story on a specific character to create a personal and oft-devastating tale of the damages caused by cycles of vengeance, fear and oppression, and the struggles of those caught in between to survive.  There are no heroes here, only real people, and they are tremendous.
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