This is a review of all three books, mainly because I feel that they’re all rather formulaic at their core. These are fantasy novels written by the ostensibly left-wing feminist Kristin Cashore, and they take place in a mystical realm with two major landmasses separated by a mountain range: The Seven Kingdoms and The Dells. Graceling and Bitterblue both take place in the Seven Kingdoms, while Fire, the middle book, takes place in the Dells.

In the Seven Kingdoms, there are people with special abilities called Gracelings – each of these people are gifted in one area. Someone might be a phenomenal cook, someone else might be able to read minds, etc. They are distinguished by their odd eyes – one eye might be green, the other blue.

In the Dells, there are brightly colored animals called monsters. There appears to be no other major difference to these animals other than their outlandish coloring. There were human “monsters” with brightly colored hair and special abilities, like mind control, but they died out, and the book Fire starts out with the last human monster in the Dells – a dark-skinned, red haired girl named Fire.

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I should be ashamed of myself.  Not only did I read the (bad) reviews before reading the book, I read reviews AFTER reading the book and have (almost) nothing original to say about it!  In fact, I AM ashamed of myself, but I wanted to write about it anyway.

By the way, I read this back in January, and wrote the first draft of this review way back then.

Brief summary of the book can be found on Good Reads.  I will copy and paste the first paragraph:

The last time she did, it was an accident, but The Reestablishment locked her up for murder. No one knows why Juliette’s touch is fatal. As long as she doesn’t hurt anyone else, no one really cares. The world is too busy crumbling to pieces to pay attention to a 17-year-old girl. Diseases are destroying the population, food is hard to find, birds don’t fly anymore, and the clouds are the wrong color.

The review is kind of spoiler-ish…

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I read this in an afternoon.  I was bored and had nothing better to do.

I didn’t like this one too much.  The main character Sarah was an unlikeable skank, and the book was mostly really boring – the build up of Sarah’s relationship with Agnes and Maddy took forever.  The good stuff happened a few chapters after the fawn died.  I never was able to muster up any sympathy or caring for Sarah at all.  I thought the relationship between Agnes and Maddy was far more interesting.  I only finished it to see how many random strangers Sarah would sleep with (only two; three if you count the random person she slept with in high school).  I don’t know what it is with authors and their penchant for writing distinctly unlikeable characters – this whole casual sex thing is a rather contrived character flaw.  Not only a contrived character flaw, but a half-assed character flaw that also seems to be some sort of political statement.  I dunno.  I just think there’s a difference between truly flawed characters and truly unlikeable characters with a boatload of very bad habits and characteristics.

The ending was also really sad.  I think this book was marketed as a paranormal young adult novel, but there wasn’t anything really paranormal about it, other than the possibility of Maddy casting a spell on Sarah to make her chubby.