Fire Becomes Her
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In Rosiee Thor's lavish fantasy novel with a Jazz Age spark, a politically savvy teen must weigh her desire to climb the social ladder against her heart in a world where magic buys votes.
Flare is power.
With only a drop of flare, one can light the night sky with fireworks . . . or burn a building to the ground -- and seventeen-year-old Ingrid Ellis wants her fair share.
Ingrid doesn't have a family fortune, monetary or magical, but at least she has a plan: Rise to the top on the arm of Linden Holt, heir to a hefty political legacy and the largest fortune of flare in all of Candesce. Her only obstacle is Linden's father who refuses to acknowledge her.
So when Senator Holt announces his run for president, Ingrid uses the situation to her advantage. She strikes a deal to spy on the senator’s opposition in exchange for his approval and the status she so desperately craves. But the longer Ingrid wears two masks, the more she questions where her true allegiances lie.
Will she stand with the Holts, or will she forge her own path?
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3.5 rounded up.
I love this crop of modern fantasy books that look at the old-school traditionalists that cry out ‘realism' when we wonder where gender and sexual diversity - and equality - is in our magic and dragons books and are all like: nope!
Without knowing anything about this book, I wanted to read it, simply on the strength of how much I loved Thor's Tarnished are the Stars - which was, honestly, probably a lot of stress to put on this book.
Anyway, this is a very difficult book for me to rate. If I hadn't been at work, with this the only audio book I had downloaded at the time, when I started listening to it, I would have DNF'd it around chapter three.
Basically, a rating breakdown would look like this:
First third: 2 stars
Middle third: 3 stars
Final third: 4 stars
By the time the final third came around, Ingrid actually started becoming likable. Prior to that, she was only occasionally not terrible. (Around the Meyers' campaign people.) Otherwise, around Linden and her dad and when she was by herself, I kind of hated her. Not for any real, major reason. I just found her too wishy-washy and pretty insufferable.
Oh, and having her and Linden as a couple from the start was 100% a surefire way to make me not care a bit about them as a couple. Which...made it all the more surprising that I came to like Linden even before I started to like Ingrid - because he was not at all what I expected.
And I do like all the other people Ingrid surrounds herself with: Alex, Charlotte, Faye, Bertie, Clarence, Louise and Gwendolyn. They are all an amazing cast of characters and...that made it stick out unbelievably horribly for over half the book that I just didn't like Ingrid. Seriously, I liked everyone else - which is why I kept going after I met them - just not Ingrid for the longest time.
Finally, I have to say that I have very, very strong feels for the ... not-romance in the book. I love that was the tent-peg relationship and I would have loved it even more if more of a focus could have been on that and not Ingrid's uncomfortable romance.
(Side note: I think with two of the books I've read this year, I am going to have to create a qpr shelf, because that is what I believe the modern term would be. Right? I'm still a little fuzzy on queer platonic, but I think this is it.)
