Thursday, December 3, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: We Hunt the Flame by Hafsah Faizal

 




We Hunt the Flame is a YA Fantasy novel from Hafsah Faizal, featuring an Arabia/Muslim-inspired setting.  I missed the novel at first, but it won the Ignyte Award in October for best YA novel in 2019 over a couple novels I'd really loved.  So I was definitely interested in checking it out, and since it was a pretty big book sales wise, it was no surprise that all my libraries and Hoopla had a copy.  So I read it over a week in both audiobook* and print form, so that I could finish it in a single work week.

And well, I enjoyed We Hunt the Flame a good bit, as a very enjoyable piece of YA Fantasy with its non-Western based setting, a pair of very enjoyable protagonists, and a plot that might be more than a bit predictable, but is executed really well overall.  On the other hand, the novel isn't just predictable but relies upon a plot formula that has been done to death in recent years, and while it works well enough, it's also not quite strong enough to stand out significantly from the pack.  In short, I enjoyed this, and am happy to have read it, and definitely await the sequel, but I just couldn't love it as much as others seem to have done.  

*Usual Disclaimer about spelling and reading this in audiobook applies to this review.  Of note, the audiobook features two very different readers for each of its characters' points of view, and it's a bit jarring, even if the two are done well individually.*


----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
Arawiya used to be a land filled with magic, a land of happiness, under the leadership of the Six Sisters, mysterious magically gifted immortal women who contained evils and brought forth an era of peace and prosperity.  Then the Sisters disappeared or died - depending upon the story - and Arawiya splintered, with the dark cursed forest known as The Arz growing and growing in the land's midst, slowly engulfing its five caliphates and driving anyone who dares to enter it.....mad.  And the Ars isn't the only dark thing now plaguing the land: the country's ostensible ruler, the Sultan, has been sending his heir, Crown Prince Nasir - the Prince of Death - to murder those who oppose him, and has recently overthrown one of the Caliphs and taken over his power.  It is a dark and cruel time, seemingly with no end.

Zafira is an oddity in Arawiya, though very few people know it.  Secretly, she is the mysterious Hunter, a person dressed as a man who is somehow able to enter The Arz and hunt within it, using her skills to feed her poor people in her snowy and chilly Caliphate - a Caliphate ruled by a man who blames women for the land's losses.  Lonely despite her few devoted friends and sister, especially after the tragic death of her father, Zafira lives on without much joy - until one day she receives an invitation to go on a quest: to cross the Arz and to go to the lost island of Sharr to find a tome that could bring magic back to the land.  But Sharr is a legend: a land filled with dark magic and creatures locked away once by the Sisters to prevent them from destroying humankind - the land where the Sisters once waged war against an impossible foe...and never returned.  

And the creatures on Sharr are not the only foes Zafira may face on the island - for the Sultan has sent Nasir himself to hunt her down and to take the book for his own purposes.  But Nasir, despite his reputation, isn't quite what Zafira expected, and the two of them will uncover things on Sharr - both good and bad....that they could never have expected....
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Evaluating We Hunt the Flame fairly is difficult for me because it uses a very similar plot structure to a number of other books I've read this year - including some I've read pretty recently.  So you have a duo of protagonists from whose points of view the book is told (mostly by alternating chapter to chapter, although the book isn't quite as strict to stick to that as it gets further on) - a duo of opposite genders from very very different backgrounds, destined to collide from the very beginning (as seen for example in books like A Song of Wraiths and Ruin, The Tiger at Midnight, The Vanished Queen, etc. etc. etc.).  You also have a sinister dark magical forest that keeps growing and threatening the land (see Forest of Souls).  Again as I've said over and over and OVER again, originality is tremendously overrated, so the use of these tropes and plot structures is not a problem in and of itself except in that it makes it hard for me not to compare this book to those others, many of which I've liked a lot.  

And We Hunt the Flame does a lot of good with this plot structure, and some unique stuff too.  The book's setting is based upon Arabia/Muslim Myth, and is extremely well built and interesting to learn about.  We only really get to know one of the five caliphates in depth, Demenhur, a land filled with snow and cold, as well as a leader who reacted to the loss of magic by blaming women.  It's a land where the residents wish for the warmth of sand (take that, Anakin Skywalker!), and a poor one at that, but where the people are mostly happy surviving...despite the gender-based oppression.  But this gender discrimination doesn't apply to the other four caliphates, and what we get to know of them all is certainly interesting as well, as is the magical dark island of Sharr and the terror that is the Sultan's Keep.  The plot structure may be similar to other works, but the setting is very well done on its own, which made it hard not to want to read more.

Also helping are the strengths of our two main characters:  Zafira and Nasir.  Both feel like they simply exist without living, and don't really know what else there is out there....and are scared to take steps to try and find out: Zafira by revealing herself as a woman at first and Nasir by going against the wishes of his cruel father, despite the harm that will come to others if he tries.  Zafira is obviously more sympathetic from the start - she's the pure of heart hunter who has been hit by tragedy and who fears finding anything more, and you just want her to see the love that's right in front of her.  Nasir is obviously not - he's a Hashashin (Assassin) who has murdered countless people on his father's orders, most of them innocent, and while his father uses torture of both Nasir and others to break Nasir into obeying without question, it's hard not to want to yell at him to stop his evil acts...and yet Faizal does an excellent job portraying his internal conflict in a way that makes him not only believable, but a character to root for as well.  

Where things honestly don't work as well is well, the connection between Nasir and Zafira.  It's not a bad slow burn romance, as these things go, but it's nothing special, and it has to overcome a serious flaw:  Zafira's friend Deen, who loves Zafira quite passionately and wishes to marry her.  The book tries to argue seemingly that Zafira's love for Deen is more of that of a sister-brother love than that of romance, despite Deen's wishes....but it kind of reads more like she's in denial than anything?  And so when something befalls Deen to allow Nasir and Zafira to gain a connection without an interloper in the way, it just feels incredibly awkward - even more than the book is trying to make it.  It just feels weird, and while some of that is deliberate, not all of it is and it's kind of a mess by the end.  The book also has at one point like a billion reveals in a row, some ridiculously obvious (you will guess the identity of the main antagonist like 20% of the way through, but the main protagonists somehow are tremendously surprised) and some utterly not, and they just come one after the other to the point of making me feel whiplash. 

This is book 1 of a duology, so of course it ends on a cliffhanger, although it's a satisfying one.  And again, I really enjoyed the setting and the main characters - the main duo and some few others we meet along the way especially - so I'm excited for the sequel.  But I do have to say that it doesn't quite really stand out as compared to other books with the same structure, so I don't quite get all the love it got to earn some of its awards.   

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