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A review by crofteereader
The Fires of Vengeance by Evan Winter
3.0
Lacking the momentum of Rage of Dragons, Fires of Vengeance kind of takes a step back to fill in details of the world and politics. I was excited to finally learn more about the structure of government in the warring Omehi people - between the queen, three councils, military leadership, magical leadership, and a rigid caste system, there was a lot to balance. I kind of like that we got to see it as Queen Tsiora stripped it all away until her whole leadership team has been replaced by young people we met in the previous book (I'm not 100% on everybody's ages, but it's young)
For me, it also felt very disconnected from the characters we've seen. Suddenly Tau is an eloquent speaker who seems to fully understand the expectations of the position forced upon him. We don't get to see him interact often with the characters we met in Rage; Hadith and Uduak only talk to him in group settings, and Yaw and Themba really just serve to balance out the dynamics of the team. Jabari had a lot of potential but he's kind of picked up and dropped whenever it's convenient. The only characters who seem to interact with him with any sort of real depth are Tsiora and Niyah.
Also, I never want to hear the royal we ever again. Ever.
Basically, Fires suffers from second-book-in-a-trilogy syndrome. By trying to expand the world, we end up doing weird things with the timeline, underutilizing characters with a lot of depth achieved in the previous book, and a series of events that ends up feeling sudden and jarring and then unresolved. Too much of "we have this big problem and it's time sensitive" (call it Problem A) but "we also have this other comparably big problem in the other direction but closer" (call it Problem B); so they abandon problem A in favor of Problem B and then once B is solved (100+ pages later) oh right, there's Problem A (with no real mention of what Problem A has been up to in the meantime - and oh by the way several months have actually passed since we first discovered Problem A). And then we finally start chasing Problem A and a Problem C arises and the book ends. Leaving only Problem B resolved.
Now the writing is still compulsively readable. You can just eat the pages, glancing up to find you've devoured half the book in one sitting. But it just doesn't have the same level of mastery as Rage. Will I still read book three? Absolutely.
For me, it also felt very disconnected from the characters we've seen. Suddenly Tau is an eloquent speaker who seems to fully understand the expectations of the position forced upon him. We don't get to see him interact often with the characters we met in Rage; Hadith and Uduak only talk to him in group settings, and Yaw and Themba really just serve to balance out the dynamics of the team. Jabari had a lot of potential but he's kind of picked up and dropped whenever it's convenient. The only characters who seem to interact with him with any sort of real depth are Tsiora and Niyah.
Also, I never want to hear the royal we ever again. Ever.
Basically, Fires suffers from second-book-in-a-trilogy syndrome. By trying to expand the world, we end up doing weird things with the timeline, underutilizing characters with a lot of depth achieved in the previous book, and a series of events that ends up feeling sudden and jarring and then unresolved. Too much of "we have this big problem and it's time sensitive" (call it Problem A) but "we also have this other comparably big problem in the other direction but closer" (call it Problem B); so they abandon problem A in favor of Problem B and then once B is solved (100+ pages later) oh right, there's Problem A (with no real mention of what Problem A has been up to in the meantime - and oh by the way several months have actually passed since we first discovered Problem A). And then we finally start chasing Problem A and a Problem C arises and the book ends. Leaving only Problem B resolved.
Now the writing is still compulsively readable. You can just eat the pages, glancing up to find you've devoured half the book in one sitting. But it just doesn't have the same level of mastery as Rage. Will I still read book three? Absolutely.