It Ends in Fire

 

When it comes to burning down the world, anger’s all you need. But if you want to build something better, if you want to make a new world, you need more than anger. You need something to love.

This isn’t my first book by Andrew Shvarts, and once again I find his writing style sort of difficult to parse, despite the story being really engaging. The prose is smooth, and on the big picture level, the story’s well-crafted, but something happens on the scene level that prevents immersion. Part of it, I think, is that there’s a little too much telling. But when it comes to showing, it gets kind of… too cinematic. Theatrical, even. There’s very little subtlety, everything’s on the nose: here’s a dramatic decision, here’s a secret, here’s a tough choice. The writing never let me forget I was reading a made-up story, if that makes sense.
Despite all of the above, the book was reasonably engaging. I enjoyed the worldbuilding. I liked how the Blackwater Academy was, in a lot of way, a commentary on Hogwarts and a more realistic look at how some of those magical school tropes aren’t “nice and wholesome” or “fun and adventurous” at all, but rather harmful and traumatizing in the long run. There was a lot of interesting discussion about corrupt societies here in general. On top of all this darker stuff, I very much appreciated how casually queernorm the setting is. I also found the magic system here super interesting, with all the glyph carving and the Null. I’d love to play a game with this magic system!
I kind of… low-key hated the main character, though. Not as a person; more like… the execution? How Alka feels more like a plot device than a protagonist? It’s not that she’s passive; she certainly does a lot, and in the end, her actions cause huge ripples. But they’re not really her actions. On her own, she’s rash and impulsive and frankly looks incapable of executing a plan start to finish. She’s sent on this important undercover mission, and she almost fucks it up on the very first evening. But see, she has a super power: insane luck. Lots of people who are more capable, skilled, and cold-minded single her out, decide she’s special, and throw their support behind her. They step in to keep her from doing something too rash, they save her life, they give her advice, they come up with plans for her to execute, etc, etc. And Alka just swings from one approach to another based on which of these people she’s currently closest to. Good thing they’re all leading her in the same general direction?
It would actually be super interesting if Alka gradually acknowledged this fact, but she doesn’t, not really. She attributes lots of those choices and decisions to herself, while when you look at the bigger picture, she keeps being an arrow someone else is shooting at targets. Honestly, I would much prefer to see the same story play out through someone else’s eyes. Marlena, maybe, since she’s basically doing most of the puppeteering throughout the story. Or, for a more adult take on the same story, Calfex. Alka could still exist in the plot and play the same part, but as a plot device that she is, not as a focal character. Now that book would get a solid 5 stars from me.

With all that said, there were still a lot of things I liked. I’ve listed most of them above, but now that I think of it, I’d like to add one more: the way the love triangle was handled, as a choice between two ways of interacting with the world, two sets of beliefs to challenge, rather than a “he’s hot, she’s hot too, whatever do I do.” I also enjoyed the dual timelines and all the scenes from the past, although some of them left me with unanswered questions. The book does end in a way that suggests there might be a sequel, so maybe that’s where I’ll find my answers. Despite all my gripes with the book, I remain curious!