All posts tagged Japan

The Smoke in the Sun Robbed Me of Sleep

By Brookelorren on 1 Comment

Smoke in the Sun, the sequel to Renée Ahdieh’s Flame in the Mist, robbed me of my sleep.  I was fortunate in that it arrived a day early.  Yay!  It was a great book, although perhaps not as captivating as the first one was.

This review contains spoilers for Flame in the Mist, so if you haven’t read it yet, proceed at your own peril.

What of Mariko
With wedding bells in her sight
Will she lose her love?

As we begin our story, Mariko is getting ready to marry Prince Raiden, a man that she does not love.  Her true love, Ōkami, is locked away in the dungeon, destined for death.  Mariko has to play the part of a clueless, submissive girl in order to try to save her love, even if it means that she will have to marry someone else.

Smoke in the Sun answers a lot of the questions that we are still left with at the beginning of the first book.  Will Mariko be able to save her true love from the jaws of death?  Who tried to kill her in the first place?  Will Mariko and Ōkami get to live happily ever after?  You’ll have to read this book to get the answers.

I enjoyed Smoke in the Sun a lot.  The book was full of court intrigue, introduced us to new characters, some honorable, some not, and kept us wondering what will happen to our two lovebirds up until the very end.  I love how Ahdieh wraps up the book nicely.  I also loved how some of the characters that we got to know in the first place stepped up to become more than they were in the original book.

I didn’t think that Smoke in the Sun was quite as good as Flame in the Mist, however.  One of the charming things about the first book is watching Ōkami and Mariko fall in love, share their first kisses, that sort of thing.  That’s a little hard to do when half of the couple is in the dungeon and the other half of the couple is marrying somebody else.  I suppose it’s not the story’s fault — obviously, these problems are going to have to resolve themselves before they can get back together, but it does make the first book much more fun than the second book.

If you enjoyed the first book, you’ll definitely want to read Smoke in the Sun.  It answered all of the questions that I had at the end of Flame in the Mist, and resolved itself in such a way that I’m not going to go to bed tonight (as I just finished it) crying in frustration or vowing to fix the ending with fanfiction.  Even if it’s not quite as good as the first one, I’m sure that you’ll still love it like I do.

Flame in the Mist was On Fire!

By Brookelorren on Leave a Comment

Flame in the Mist coverFlame in the Mist is one of my new favorite books. I was recently looking through Goodreads for something good to read that I could check out of the library on my Kindle, and I came across it as a recommendation. It was available for checkout, so I decided to take a look.

I couldn’t put it down. Well, I actually had to, because I had to go to work, but I read it at lunch.  I thought about it while I was working.  I read it on my break.  When I went home, I finished it.  Then I pre-ordered the sequel, Smoke in the Sun.  Then I read it some more.  Even though I checked it out of the library, I’m considering buying a copy of my own.

This book is set in a sort of medieval-fantasy Japan.  Our heroine, Mariko, is set to marry one of the emperor’s sons, but she is very resentful of that fact.  Mariko is very clever and wants to be more than just a bargaining chip that her family can use to improve their status in the kingdom; however, in the beginning of the book, she has resigned herself to becoming just that, and nothing more.

All that changes when she is traveling to the capital city of Inako and her party is ambushed by, presumably, the Black Clan.  She manages to escape, and must make brave choices in order to survive.  One of these brave choices is to dress up like a boy and infiltrate the Black Clan itself — she wants to find out why they tried to kill her.  While with the Black Clan, she finds that she is valued for who she is, and ends up falling in love.

As I read the book, I had to know what was going to happen next.  Surely, they’re going to discover that she’s a girl.  I had to go back to work right in the middle of a scene where she is taking a bath in these hot springs with a boy, and I’m at work thinking about whether she is going to be found out or not.  Of course, she is eventually discovered, and that does cause some complications, but I won’t give away any spoilers here.  You’ll really just have to read it to find out (I’m sure that you’ll want to).

I love just about everything about this book.  I love the characters, I love the setting, I love the relationship between Mariko and her newfound love (and I’m not saying who that turns out to be either) and I find the plot twist at the end interesting as well.  There are still a few unanswered questions left as I finished the book, but I’m sure that they will be resolved on June 5th, which I will be spending reading Smoke in the Sun (hooray, I don’t work on Tuesdays and can spend the entire day reading it!).  I feel fortunate that I just discovered this book last week and only have a few weeks to count down before the sequel comes out (whereas I spent months anticipating the release of The Fates Divide).  I think that the one drawback that some people might find a little hard to deal with is all the Japanese terms that are used.  Some of them I understood, like katana, but then there are others that I didn’t.  There is a glossary in the back (which I didn’t know about until I finished reading the book for the first time), but even without the glossary, I still had the general idea of what all the terms meant.

Read this book though.  It’s great.