The Girl of Fire and Thorns Review

This week's novel is The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson.

Elisa, the younger, less thin princess was chosen by God as a baby to do a great act of service, as evidenced by the stone in her navel that warms with her prayers.  On her sixteenth birthday, she's married to the king of the neighboring kingdom, who is about to be invaded by an army led by wizards.  It starts like a book that will be about Elisa growing to love her new husband, but at the half way point she gets kidnapped and taken to the desert, where she ends up leading a guerrilla war against the invaders.

The setting of this is really cool because it's Spanish inspired (Carson names Spanish Morocco and the Mexican Caribbean as influences).  I don't see a lot of that, it's always fun to read about a world that's lush and immersive and not set in Europe in the middle ages.  (You know I don't care about Europe in the middle ages.)

Somewhat related to that, I liked what a strong presence religion had to the cultures in the book, just as Catholicism has a strong presence in the Spanish speaking world.  Religion gets left out a lot in fantasy as something authors don't want to touch because they don't care for it or because they don't want to offend to turn readers off.  I can see from other reviews of this book that it did turn some people off.  But I liked it, because religion and culture are so bound together that when you create a culture and just pretend they don't have a religion it feels incomplete.  This religion, although a Catholic analog, was mined pretty deeply.  There were primary religious texts and secondary religious texts, rituals and interpretations and worshipers with various levels of belief.  Faith comes up as a theme over and over, both faith in God and Elisa's faith in herself.


I don't know how I feel about Elisa's weight.  I like that there was a plus sized heroine who had her act together and she got respect by being smart and pious.  I liked that she gave zero shits about how she looked when she was eating, because the food was delicious.  She truly enjoyed food.  And I liked that we got some mouthwatering descriptions of meals out of that.  However, when she's kidnapped and marched through the desert for months, she loses weight because she's marching all day through the desert and sweating and eating rationed food and drinking rationed water.  So she loses weight in the story around the same time that she gains self-confidence.  There's not a direct relation between the two, but...there is.

A lot of the characters were underdeveloped.  At one point Elisa decides she's in love with one of these characters, and I realized I hadn't bothered to remember his name because he hadn't done anything, and hadn't stood out from the other people in his group enough to get a name in my head behind "One of X Group Guys."  Everyone is so closed off and distant that I assumed everyone was planning to betray Elisa.  Only two of them did, but I was convinced eight of them were going to.

***

Next week: Million Worlds with You, the final book in the Firebird Trillogy by Claudia Gray.