Flame in the Mist & Smoke in the Sun

 by Sophia Chen

Hello people. Originally for this week's blog, I was going to recommend books for API Heritage Month, but frankly, I'm very seldom satisfied with the Asian rep we get in YA -- or any American mainstream books, for that matter. So I'll just recommend one, or rather two: a duology, made up of the books Flame in the Mist and Smoke in the Sun by Renee Ahdieh.

Flame in the Mist is part romance, part fantasy, part historical fiction. Typically I don't really enjoy historical fiction novels that involve magic, because I kind of like to keep my genres distinct for whatever reason, but I did enjoy this one regardless.

It's a novel about an aristocratic girl named Mariko, who lives in a fictionalized version of imperial Japan who is betrothed to some prince or other. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), her caravan is attacked on the way to meeting the prince for the first time and everyone except her dies tragically. Instead of returning to her home, she decides to take matters into her own hands and find whoever attacked her, and find out why. She does this by disguising herself as a man (people often call it "the Japanese Mulan," but since I've never watched Mulan, I can't really speak on that. Also it's a bit weird to me that they're comparing a fictional book written by some American-Korean person in the 21st century to a piece of traditional Chinese folklore, but whatever).

Mariko's brother, meanwhile, who is a samurai-in-training (? Or perhaps he's already become a full-fledged samurai; I don't remember) thinks she's dead and goes on a murder spree trying to find her killers. Mariko knows she must avoid being discovered by him because she will be forced to return to her home and to the oppressive life of a rich person, I guess.

Although the characters were a bit lackluster -- especially the MC -- I enjoyed this book for the plot (rare for me) and for the prose. I thought that the writing was quite nice in some parts, and I enjoyed the different storylines and character motivations weaving together in complicated ways but which actually make sense. There are some books that introduce weird side plots that seem irrelevant to the main plot and involve completely different characters, but Flame in the Mist isn't one of them.

There's also a sequel, Smoke in the Sun, which is less a sequel and more the second part of a duology (I know they sound the same, but in my opinion, a sequel is when the first book can stand alone; a duology is more like a normal series, where an overarching plot can be seen. There's absolutely no resolution at the end of Flame in the Mist -- the opposite, actually; there's a cliffhanger). Smoke in the Sun is, I daresay, better than Flame in the Mist, because the characters appeared more fleshed-out and three-dimensional in Smoke in the Sun, after we learned more details about them as Mariko did. (Mariko herself's character remains dry, though.) Not to mention Ahdieh managed to include some queer angst in Smoke in the Sun, which I'm always here for.