Flame in the Mist (Flame in the Mist #1)
By Renée Ahdieh
Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers
Format: eARC
Source: First to Read
Publication Date: May 16, 2017
To Sum It Up: Hattori Mariko has grown up in a privileged world and is about to fulfill her family duty by marrying the son of the emperor. As she and her convoy travel to the imperial city, they are ambushed, leaving Mariko as the lone survivor. She suspects that a band of mercenaries known as the Black Clan is behind the attack, and Mariko sets out to track them and discover who ordered them to kill her. Meanwhile, Mariko’s twin brother Kenshin, a renowned samurai, refuses to believe that his sister is gone and is determined to find her. As Mariko, disguised as a boy, goes on her own dangerous search for answers, she begins to realize that the truth behind the attempt on her life is much more complicated than she first thought.
Review: Having heard so much about Renée Ahdieh’s The Wrath and the Dawn (which, alas, I still have not read), I jumped at the opportunity to read Flame in the Mist. I was even more thrilled to find out that the book is set in feudal Japan and is loosely based on the story of Mulan.
Ahdieh builds the world very well, really making you feel as though you’ve been transported to another time and place. The eARC has a glossary of Japanese words at the end, but I never really felt the need to consult it because the context clues were often enough to glean the meaning of any unfamiliar terms.
Where the book faltered for me, and it always pains me to say this, was with its protagonist. Mariko is the type of heroine who makes a lot of epic statements about how much ass she’s going to kick but doesn’t really follow through. She talks about female empowerment and becoming more than the dutiful daughter marrying to elevate her family’s status, but by the end of the book, I wasn’t quite convinced that Mariko had transformed into the fierce warrior she thought she was. I found her decision-making skills lacking, despite the frequent mentions of her keen mind. I wish that there had been more demonstrations of Mariko’s keen mind to back up the references to it.
I also expected a bit more to the plot than just Mariko’s quest to worm her way into the Black Clan, the group of bandits she believes tried to kill her, in order to learn who hired them. The novel occasionally cuts away to follow Mariko’s twin brother Kenshin, the famed samurai known as the Dragon of Kai, as he searches for his sister. As with Mariko’s arc, there wasn’t a whole lot more to Kenshin’s than finding his sister.
Flame in the Mist features some hints of magic that definitely left me looking for more than hints. What is this magic? How does it work? Why can certain characters wield it? I felt as though the details weren’t all filled in so that readers would be eager to find out more about the magic in the sequel. I needed answers to at least a few questions with this book, though.
Another underwhelming aspect of the novel for me was the romance. Most of the time, I absolutely adore romances that start out rocky but do a slow burn into swoon-ville. I just wasn’t swept away by the love story here; the relationship didn’t develop gradually enough for me. I thought the two characters involved went from loathing to love without much of a transition in between.
Aside from the setting, I couldn’t find a lot to get invested in. Mariko didn’t quite fit my notion of a badass heroine, and the magic wasn’t explained adequately. The next book might provide the details, but I’m not curious enough to read it for that reason alone.
All in All: I loved the setting, but everything else was pretty meh.
