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OK - finished this one. What to say....
Things I liked:
I liked the concept of the fireflies and firechildren. I thought it was completely charming and suitably magical. In fact, the notion of the story was great for me. I thought the dark aspects of the story were welcome. This wasn't a pretty fairy tale and that kept me interested even when the situations were depressingly grim.
Thinks I liked - not so much:
The plot became decidedly jerky as it progressed. I felt that if the book was double the size maybe the transitions could be smoother. At the start we had all the detail we could want with Aeolia's story in particular - but then it became one of those "and then this happened" kind of stories. Groups of people suddenly appear here...or there. Armies on one side of the island on one page appear on the other the next. So as I progressed in my reading I actually started to become disengaged from the story.
My next issue was the characters themselves. They were not logically or consistently portrayed. At stages a character is forlorn, brave, strangely adept with weapons, weak, childish, wise. Lale is a good example of what I would call a non-sequitur character. He starts as a rather frightening and intent would-be killer who seems almost like the Terminator, but then we get rather bizarre displays of cowardly fear in the forest, followed by an unexplained and unlikely sexual side completed by a strange and unbelievable sigh of regret at the end. With the characters in this book it's a constant case of pieces that don't seem to fit.
I still gave this a 3-star rating as I thought the overall charm of the story ideas and the satisfying darkness combine to make this a good read. I am also interested to pick up another novel and see if the character/plot development is smoother in later books as this was a first novel.
Regards
Caleb
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