Book Review: The Twisting Flame

Title: The Twisting Flame

Author: Tayvia Pierce

Date: 2021

ISBN: 978-1-09837-795-3

Quote: "If you do not stop, I will kill your sister and everyone else."

So saying, the loathsome enemy soldier Eilam drags the young heiress Carys back to his own country, where she learns some things about the history and politics of her world. Ben, a good friend on whom her little sister has a crush, was born Barak, a rival Eilam hates. Their semi-civilized nation see Carys's nation and its allies as oppressive invaders. Carys herself is a half-breed; her mother's nation don't think much of her father's nation either, and even after escaping from Eilam, Carys is still in danger from her own mother and uncle.

Trigger warnings: lots of violence, more deaths onstage than in A Single Spark; blood and broken bones and sword fights to the death, and multiple rapes. Sympathetic characters die from sword and axe wounds. Eilam forcibly impregnates Carys just to spite Barak; one of her mother's people forcibly aborts her in an attempt to kill her. Carys is a welcome improvement on all those fictional heroines who, even if they just crawled out of the wreck of a burned building, take time to find a mirror and assure us that they still look young and pretty; she doesn't take stock of herself in any mirrors but does acknowledge that, by the end of this book, she's not to be imagined as a young Hollywood type but as a scarred, limping veteran. Carys fails to kill Eilam, much as she says she wants him dead, but by the end of the book she's killed another man. And, as he was trying to kill a friend of hers, she's not sorry.

I don't know how intentional it is that I find Carys less likable than the heroines of some other fantasy fiction discussed here. Well, she's not trying to be like Tolkien's Eowyn or McCaffrey's Lessa or C. Gockel's Cherie. She seems to represent the British influence on her world, though Pierce never identifies any part of her world with any part of ours, while Barak's and Eilam's nation reminds one of Palestine. Carys has a frosty, frigid, self-contained temperament and, at twenty-one, seems a fairly heavy drinker. But I did like her decision, even after she's been shown a vision of a future war in which her and Eilam's son will slaughter other armies, not to abort the rapist's child. She doesn't expect to love the baby but, until the sword rips it out of her, she's prepared to do her duty by it. 

If you like violent fantasies, and series of novels that end in suspense, the series that begins with A Single Spark is for you. The Twisting Flame picks up where A Single Spark left off, and volume three will pick up where Flame stopped. Flame ends on a more natural note, with readers knowing more adventures lie ahead, but with a climax and resolution of one part of the overall story.