(Sorry, y’all. WordPress was beign totally LAME Thursday and Friday and wouldn’t let me post for some reason. So you get both reviews today.)
With her rare ability to breathe fire, Jacinda is special even among the draki—the descendants of dragons who can shift between human and dragon forms. But when Jacinda’s rebelliousness leads her family to flee into the human world, she struggles to adapt, even as her draki spirit fades. The one thing that revives it is Will, whose family hunts her kind. Jacinda can’t resist getting closer to him, even though she knows she’s risking not only her life but the draki’s most closely guarded secret.
I had heard a lot of great things about this book, so when an ARC was offered up for the Traveling ARC Tours, I jumped at the opportunity to read it. Still, I was a little apprehensive about Firelight before I dove in, and for the first part of the book.
The premise is intriguing. Jacina is a Draki; descended from dragons, she has the ability to change from human to draki form at will (mostly – draki is her natural form, so when she is threatened, it is self-defense to change, whether she wants to or not). More than that, though, Jacinda is a fire-breathing draki – the first in hundreds of years.
The pride she lives with considers Jacinda their crown jewel. Could the fire-breather help them solve the problem of diminishing population? We never find out, as, after a dangerous daytime flight (forbidden), Jacinda’s mother packs Jacinda and her twin sister in the car and runs from the pride. Now Jacinda must learn to live among the humans.
Problem is (aside from missing her pride), Mom moved them to the middle of the desert, and Jacinda’s draki-self is dying. She needs the cool, humid mountain air to sustain her. She is afraid that before long, she will lose that part of her self and be able to manifest as a draki no longer.
But, there is one thing in her new town that makes her draki feel alive, that makes her feel like she can soar again: Will. Will, whose family hunts the draki for money.
This is what made me nervous about the book. I am really burned out on YA novels where the main (female) character is drawn to the person she KNOWS is dangerous for her. I read it time and time again. The narrator mentions that so-and-so is dangerous and she shouldn’t be with him, but for some inexplicable reason she is drawn to him, so safety-be-damned she will be with him anyway. I was scared I would read more of this in Firelight and that it would make me dislike the book.
But I was pleasantly surprised. Yes, Jacinda knows that being around Will is not safe. She knows who his family is and what they do. She makes an actual effort to stay away from him, despite his efforts to get closer to her. She snubs him and avoids him; she even runs away from him once or twice. Eventually, yes, she gives in and spends time with him. Unlike the books where this irritates me, though, I felt that Jacinda had a solid reason for going into the danger zone. She wasn’t just blindly following love lust, she was trying to keep alive that part of herself she feared was dying.
I did have one major qualm about the book: characterization was just so-so. The main characters were fleshed out nicely, but the secondary ones were just kind of there. The mean girl was just mean (as was her posse); no characterization other than mean. Will’s family members(aside from him, of course) were only brutes with nothing to them other than being blood-thirsty hunters. Jacinda’s few friends were there, but unremarkable (I remember almost nothing about them). Even her twin sister and mother, whose characters were pretty important in my mind, did not get fully fleshed-out.
Overall, I enjoyed Firelight immensely. The plot, while simple, was solid, and I am excited to see what happens next.
(On a side note: I LOVE simple plots. A lot of people seem to think that to be good, a book must be complicated. Not so.)
