Rating: WORTHY!
This appears to be the first volume of a series (technically a dilogy, as I discovered later), but I did not know this until I'd finished reading it and it ended on a sort of a cliffhanger. With very few exceptions, I'm not a fan of series since the first volume can only ever be a prologue, and I don't read prologues. Additionally, the other volumes are essentially repeating the same story over and over with a few minor variations. They're boring to me. I respect authors more who bring out new single volumes about different people having different adventures.
That said, this one turned out to be not bad at all. It reminded me in some small ways of my own Femarine, and it kept me engaged. Although there were parts of it that left me yawning a little, for the most part it moved and kept me moving with it. There was a hint here and there of romance, but it was not overdone, and I appreciated that. I found the idea of twin sisters, both fated to have different, but critical futures, quite engaging and the fresh take on the legend of the Firebird proved to be a really good one.
Let me deal with the elephant in the room first: Kindle! It's no revelation to anyone who reads my reviews that I am not a fan at all of Amazon and refuse to publish my books on that platform. I don't like them for a variety of reason, not least of which is the fact that they routinely turn their ebooks into Kindling. The Kindle conversion process will slice and dice anything that's not pretty much plain vanilla text, and even then it's sometimes touch and go as to whether a given book will make it through the process unscathed. This one did not, although it got off lightly.
One oddball thing I noticed, which I've seen before in Kindled books, was that everywhere the letters F and L appeared successively in a word, there was a space between them, so I read, for example, "Asya's hands tightened ref_lexively," and I also read, "warped ref_lections, with points where their images converged." The underscore I've added for clarity indicates where there was a space in the text and it occurred frequently throughout the novel in an assortment of words containing 'fl'. Why Kindle does this I do not know, but I've seen this same thing before in more than one ebook prior to this. Other than that, the text was fine except for the occasional intrusion of the page header into the text itself, such as when I read this about halfway down the screen:
An echoing screech that rattled down to Izaveta's bones.But these intrusions were quite rare. (I did love that title - just not in the middle of my reading!). This is one reason why I never put page headers in my own novels. Another reason is that I see no point to it, but that's just me!
THESE FEATHERED FLAMES 199
She looked up just in time to see the creature
There was the occasional problem with grammar. We've all been there! The few I noticed were these:
"His gaze were unusually focused when he spoke." Which should read, 'his gaze was', or 'his eyes were'. A common one I've seen in YA books is the confusion of stanch with staunch. I read, "digging the fabric of her shirt into the cut to staunch the blood," which is wrong. The word is 'stanch'. Staunch means something else entirely. This issue was curious because this author with the amazing name of Alexandra Overy, uses the past participle of 'tread' perfectly, where other authors often get that wrong, using 'treaded' instead of 'trod'. At another point I read, "Asya gritted her jaw," but you can't grit your jaw. You can grit your teeth. Gritting teeth means to press or clench teeth together. You cannot therefore grit your jaw. Another curious instance was "trying to grasp on to her fracturing facade of confidence." 'Grasp on' felt wrong. 'Hold on' would have been better, or 'cling to'. I think the author was confusing grasp with grab, but grab wouldn't work there either.
Aside from that, the writing was fine and well done, which I appreciated. There was one oddity which I freely admit is a pet peeve of mine, and which use (or misuse!) seems to be coming more and more common. This is where someone uses a title but instead of saying I am 'so-and-so' they say 'my name is 'so-and-so'. For example, I read in this novel, "My name is Ambassador Täusch." But it really isn't, unless his first name does actually happen to be 'Ambassador'! What he ought to have said was "I'm Ambassador Täusch," but that said, people often misspeak, so maybe this squeaks by as an example of that!
The other issue connected with this was people referring to the queen incorrectly. If Täusch was truly an ambassador, then he really should know that you don't address a queen or a princess as "My lady." The correct approach is to address her initially as 'Your Majesty' and then subsequently use 'Ma'am'. This is British protocol, and both I and the author are British-born ex-pats as it happens. This novel is set in a Russian fantasy land, yet even there, 'Your Majesty' was used (or whatever the Russian equivalent was) when there used to be a queen. 'Your highness' is no longer used in Britain, but it was employed in Russia in imperial times. Not that I have any respect for the hereditary privilege of royalty or wealth, but for the sake of a story I'd use it.
In that regard, and purely from the perspective of story-telling, I found it inexcusable how disrespectful people were to the queen in this novel, and how little reaction she had to this. I know she was a teen and new to the throne, but everyone spoke to her not like she was the queen, but like she was this little girl. it was not only the queen who failed to react to this: no one else ever corrected people or took umbrage at this lack of deference! If felt wrong, and often jarred me out of my suspension of disbelief. Even Castelle, my young queen from Femarine who - the story makes clear - is shamefully lax in matters of propriety and protocol, was moved to comment on such laxity on occasion. Like I said, in real life I don't care about that nonsense, but in a novel like this I would expect someone to call out a person who wasn't respectful to a monarch. This was a relatively minor irritant, so I was willing to let it go for the sake of a good story though.
Now about that! I know it's taken a while to get here, but I'm nothing if not thorough in my reviews! So this story is of twins of royal blood in a fantasy world based on historical Russia. One of the twins, by tradition, is destined to become the Firebird - exacting a toll for the use of magic when said magic is enacted without paying a price (and they don't take American Express!); the other twin is destined to become the queen, succeeding their mother.
In Britain there used to be an exam called the 'eleven plus', which determined if a child went to a vocational school or to what used to be called a grammar school which was intended for the more academically-inclined. The system was not fair because it judged children and determined a future for them at far too early an age, so it was scrapped many years ago, but it seems the author has adopted this scheme for the twins, who at around that age - ten, eleven - were judged magically, in a ceremony which determined where they would end-up. It turned out that Asya would be the Firebird, and Izaveta the princess. They were separated and Asya sent to live with the queen's sister, who had become the Firebird a generation or more before.
When the queen dies unexpectedly early from a 'fever' Asya returns to the palace where her sister is in process of becoming queen. The two no longer know how to behave in each other's company because it's been so long, and they have both changed so much, and neither is properly ready to wield the power they have come into. The story is of their relationship, which I found intriguing, and of each's relationship to the queendom and the future. There are threats to their positions, both of them, because they are so young, and they neither of them know fully who they can trust - not even each other. I found the politics to be engrossing and entertaining - if on occasion annoying. There were times when the sisters acted foolishly, but they were also very young and inexperienced, so I was willing to let that side.
There were times when, if they'd only talked to each other and been honest, they could have averted a lot of the issues they faced. This is a common problem in YA stories, but it wasn't so bad here and again, the girls were young, so this could be explained away. Overall I loved how they interacted and grew into their roles, especially the firebird. I felt this was an amazing and inventive take on a myth, and done very well for the most part, and I commend this as a worthy read. That said I don't have any real interest in pursuing this story any further, because like I said, I'm not a fan of series - even if it's only two volumes, and I'm just not intrigued enough to read on. Your mileage may differ. I hope it does. because it's nice to find a series that really grips. I just don't find that very often.
