ARC REVIEW: Firelight

Sophie Jordan
Firelight (book #1)
Harper Collins
ISBN-10: 0061935085
ISBN-13: 978-0061935084
Young paranormal romance
September 7, 2010

This is one of the books I picked up at BEA in NYC this past May. Minor spoilers, so beware.

Blurb via Goodreads:

A hidden truth. Mortal enemies. Doomed love. Marked as special at an early age, Jacinda knows her every move is watched. But she longs for freedom to make her own choices. When she breaks the most sacred tenet among her kind, she nearly pays with her life. Until a beautiful stranger saves her. A stranger who was sent to hunt those like her. For Jacinda is a draki—a descendant of dragons whose greatest defense is her secret ability to shift into human form. Forced to flee into the mortal world with her family, Jacinda struggles to adapt to her new surroundings. The only bright light is Will. Gorgeous, elusive Will who stirs her inner draki to life. Although she is irresistibly drawn to him, Jacinda knows Will’s dark secret: He and his family are hunters. She should avoid him at all costs. But her inner draki is slowly slipping away—if it dies she will be left as a human forever. She’ll do anything to prevent that. Even if it means getting closer to her most dangerous enemy. Mythical powers and breathtaking romance ignite in this story of a girl who defies all expectations and whose love crosses an ancient divide.

I feel a rant coming on, but I’ll do my best to tone that down. For one thing, that’s the entire book, in a nutshell, the blurb above. There’s a lot wrong, in this reader’s opinion, with this book, but the blurb is what happens and if you’re looking for depth of any kind – character, romance, plot – it’s not in this book. I’ve heard rumblings from various people in the industry or who follow these kinds of things, that this kind of young adult book isn’t being bought as much and published. Maybe this is true, maybe it isn’t and I don’t have any proof. While I’m not a fan of saying don’t ever write another book like this again, I’ll certainly be happy never to read another one.

I started out genuinely liking Firelight. I find the premise to be, while not immediately a unique one, at least attention grabbing. Dragons haven’t quite taken off like angels in YA, not yet. But they’re coming, and the general carpet laid for this book’s use of a new mythology, that of these draki species being descended from real dragons, wasn’t a bad idea at all. I quite liked it. I liked that we get a glimpse of what life’s been like for Jacinda, the heroine, in her small hidden draki community. Her mother eventually comes to call them a cult, and she’s right. Terrified of their bloodline dying out, because draki being able to “manifest”, or change into their true draki forms, is becoming less and less of an occurrence. Something is happening to this species, and it’s not good. That’s why a teenager like Jacinda is so important. When her manifestation happened, what I came to view as, essentially, the puberty of a draki that brings on their first change into draki form, she turned out to be the first fire-breather in many, many generations. This is, of course, an instant reason for so many to want the talented young draki female. From the literal prince of the community, Cassian, to the hunters that exploit the draki for profit, Jacinda is the most wanted draki in existence.

I think this story could have gone in such a compelling and unique direction. I was set, in those first fifty or so pages, to really dig into a unique mythology about the draki, the motivations of their hunter and enkros (different from hunters, we only hear about them this installment) enemies and hopefully via a heroine that shapes it all.Instead, the book becomes disappointingly mundane.

Where the story began to devolve into a mediocre, standard young adult novel for me is when it changes in setting to a high school Jacinda and her twin sister, Tamra, attend after escaping their draki community with their mother. Because there’s this boy. This rich, insanely gorgeous, mysterious boy. And there’s the whole attraction-at-first-sight deal. Then comes the forbidden love. The yes, the no, yes, no, yes – no! Yes! The idea of some young adult romance these days resembles a ping pong match more than anything.

I get why the high school setting is popular. I do. Young adult genre after all, and kids can probably relate to the setting. They can probably even relate to these main characters and their angst-ridden feelings. What I don’t get is why it has to be about this mysterious girl meets boy scenario, a la Twilight. Oh yeah. I said it. Boy meets girl may have been around long before Twilight, but Twilight has unfortunately influenced a super spike in the number of boy meets girl plot scenarios. This particular train has really been done to death. And not very well in the process. If we could just stop making these kinds of themes into trains, there’d be no need for the train killin’. Or wagon killin’. Some folks like to call that a bandwagon, I suppose. Will no one think of those trains and wagons? There might be some good things in them, after all.

Jacinda and Will’s first meetings are these awkward, stilted and stony instances where you could cut the air, it’s that thick. Because every time they even begin to get within close distance, whether out of site of one another or not, each succumbs to these weird feelings that the other is near. Wow. You don’t say… Come on now, we can do better than this. This kind of reaction and overused tactic really only works if there is actually some kind of deep connection between the two emotionally attached individuals. Everything at the surface is screaming, These kids are attached! They’re on their way to adventure-filled love! A chainsaw couldn’t sever them!

But what’s happening is only that, only at the surface. Jacinda first person POV mopes poetical about her life. She doesn’t stop. Mope, mope and more mope. This isn’t digging below the surface. This is merely mope! Her thoughts on Will only go so far as to show how torn she is between his being a hunter and her attraction that can’t possibly be explained. It just IS. Well, just is, isn’t really good enough. Just is can be found aplenty elsewhere, too. What this book needed was something to set it apart – just like every book out there. As is upon publication…it just is.

Jacinda is probably one of the most ineffectual heroines I’ve ever read. As stated above, she’s a moper, not a doer. At first I could understand her need to want to rebel at the beginning of the book, even if she did do something stupidly dangerous. But she never goes on to actually try to do anything about her situation. The entire book is literally her moping over Will, feeling increasingly resentful towards her mother and sister, and whining about actually wanting to go back to that wing nut group of draki cultists. Even after she finds out about something terrible they have planned for her, she still wants to go back.When she’s not raving over this sore subject with her poor mother, who’s tried to save the ingrate from life as a broodmare, Jacinda is instead losing herself to this Will character, who himself has no identity outside of Jacinda’s thoughts on him. Only toward the end of the book do we get a small clue as to how he could remotely figure in to the story in the form of importance, and it’s not as if people couldn’t see it coming. Outside of love interest, Will is even more ineffectual than Jacinda. Since neither one seems to be able to exist outside of each character’s impressions of the other, it’s like they’re forming this black hole of nothingness. And that is just so, so sad.

Each person in this book has one goal they focus on and that’s it. For Jacinda, it’s getting back to the mountains that sustain her draki self and enable it to manifest freely and without pain. I so sympathized with her need to keep this part of herself from withering away, but the girl was adamantly against the fact that the issue was much bigger than that. She does absolutely nothing to try to change her situation or affect the events around her. Instead she mopes about Will and raves against her mother for trying to squelch her draki self.

If Jacinda ever attempts to seem like more than this, she just comes across as more selfish than she already did. At one point in the book, she muses about why her sister Tamra acts out of sorts with her and I couldn’t believe how deliberately clueless this kid was. She knows that Tamra not being able to manifest is a hurtful subject for her twin, yet Jacinda just has to rub it in, in the guise of engaging Tamra in a caring conversation. Instead, Jacinda comes off as enormously hurtful and mean spirited, when she’s already mused a ton about the subject, and not without sympathy for Tamra. So why now? What was the point of her being so mean to her sister? There was no point, and since Jacinda is only really driven by her need to feed her draki self, everything else is tainted by this, even her feelings for Will.

Jacinda’s mother – good grief. While I felt the woman displayed a huge helping of unusual common sense for a YA book parent, there was also the fact that at the same time, it really wasn’t fair for her to expect Jacinda to sacrifice her draki self. But because mom suppressed her draki form to the point that she can no longer manifest, she thinks this is the answer to Jacinda’s, and therefor her, problems. But she absolutely refuses to see any other way. At some point, even parents have to compromise, especially as kids get older. I’m not saying let them stay out till five a.m. god knows where, but controlling to the point that Jacinda is desperate isn’t helping either.

Will. Oh Will. Arm candy. Dangerously sexy arm candy. You know, he’s OK. Jacinda thinks he’s all that, but there isn’t really any reason for the reader to think so because their interactions only went as far as the surface. But again, his one sole purpose in this installment was to brood at Jacinda. Be aloof, then all talky and available to her. Then relentlessly available. Showing up at her house at 1:00 in the morning just to see where she lived. Refusing to see anything but Jacinda. There wasn’t anything else to him. Cookie. Cutter.

Tamra. Jacinda’s twin, and because of this, she’s the forgotten one. Girl never manifested into a draki form. So she’s just been tolerated in their draki community, never useful like Jacinda. In the human world and in school, she finally gets what she wants – to be the center of attention. She tells Jacinda a couple of times that Jacinda better not screw it up for her. Never mind that Jacinda’s natural draki instincts are pretty hard to control, especially when around humans. She tells Jacinda that she loves her, but then another crisis hits involving Jacinda’s draki self and Tamra hits the roof again, furious at the unfairness of life with a draki sister. Tamra only sees what she wants, and if she’s not getting it, hello Bratville. The lack of sisterly support combined with their mother’s somewhat blindness made for a dismally support-less home front.

Cassian, Jacinda’s promised mate back home with the draki. I don’t know which is more obnoxious, an adult caveman alpha male who wants to dominate everyone he sees, or this teenage alpha kid who wants to emulate an adult caveman alpha and dominate everything he sees, mostly Jacinda.

Now we can cue up the typical sarcastic best friend for Jacinda. Catherine is an OK person, but have you ever noticed how many of these kinds of boy meet girl Twilight Syndrome books have a sarcastic, extra witty and sometimes annoying bestie for the heroine, who’s hiding some self-esteem issues? Twilight had one, Hush, Hush did and so did Fallen. I know that’s not a landslide, but the trend is definitely noticeable. Catherine knows just enough about who’s who and what’s what to keep Jacinda and readers in the know, while herself knowing nothing about her new bestie’s double life. Her role doesn’t really add anything except as the token sarcastic best friend. Check her off the list.

Probably the most lamentable thing about the book is Jacinda wanting to go back to her draki clan, and her moping constantly over Will. Instead of leading the charge in this book, she’s dialed down to waiting on the guys in this book to make the decisions and change something, anything. Furthermore, she wants to go back to a cult-like group that will only use her to hopefully make more fire-breathing draki with Cassian, plus do other terrible things to her. Jacinda is, in effect, the kind of female character who’s only so good as the men think she is. She has no drive to be more, to go beyond these socially repressive roles they want to force on her. Oh sure, she says no, then she says she wants to go back to the draki, and then it’s no again…she has absolutely no spine of her own. She never chooses anything remotely laudable for herself.

Firelight is a big ‘ole dud in a steady parade of these kinds of duds. It is book one in a series, but I didn’t find one incentive to continue, or incentive to hope things would turn out differently than they have here. The only things it had going for it were dumped in favor of what is clearly becoming a type of young adult mediocrity. Kids are smarter than this book is, and no, I don’t think it’s going to make anyone’s young girls madly in love with the idea of sacrificing themselves for love or to give up their identities for a boy, but sadly this kind of romance can be appealing. I’d rather see a YA female lead painted in an actual empowering light, have her girl meets boy moment and still be able to take names and send the typical sexist stereotypes packing, and show that even a young woman can be smart and capable of navigating her own life. Those kinds of books are out there, but this isn’t one of them.

Rating: One Scoop