For a Muse of Fire (Heidi Heilig)

For a Muse of Fire
Heidi Heilig
Greenwillow Books
Fiction, YA Fantasy
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: In Chakrana, a land squeezed between occupying Aquitan foreigners and violent rebels, Jetta would have more than enough to contend with. But she is doubly plagued by her malheur - wild swings between near-suicidal catatonia and uncontrollable mania - and a forbidden secret: she can see the spirits of the dead, and bind them into physical objects with her blood. Though her mother instructed her never to reveal this secret, only her spirit-infused shadow puppet fantouches keep the family's fortunes from complete ruin... and offer hope of escape in the distant capital. But when their path crosses that of Leo, half-foreign bastard son of famed and feared General Legarde, Jetta becomes pulled into yet more secrets and plots - plots that could bring her the cure she has longed for, or see her family and the world she knows go up in flames.

REVIEW: If that description sounds a bit jumbled, that's because it is. The story starts in a tangle of ideas and people and names and, to a certain extent, remains that way through most of its length. It doesn't help that Jetta starts (and generally remains) a little clueless and a lot boneheaded, traits that exist independently of her mental illness (though she sometimes tries to blame it for them.) She can invariably be counted on to do the stupidest thing in any given situation; when sneaking up on armed guards, she blurts out exclamations to ruin cover, and later she decides she wants something so she violently pushes it away - just 'cause, I guess. I can't care about a character I don't like, and if I don't like the character, I'm less inclined to like the world she inhabits. Perhaps this is why I never quite bought Chakrana; Heilig admittedly mashes up several Earth regions (and inventions) in creating the landscape, but something about it felt less like a deliberate conceit and more like slapdash worldbuilding, as lemurs rub metaphoric shoulders with hummingbirds and water buffaloes. The rest of the setting, unfortunately, is often all too vivid: a land awash in violence, sadism, and a sea of gore lit by the firefly spirits of the dead... a land that was already ailing under the reign of a mad necromancer monk long before the pale-skinned Aquitans came to turn rice paddies into sugar plantations. I know that unrest and rebellion bring out the worst in many people, but at some point it went beyond color to numbing revulsion... and just kept going. As for the plot, as mentioned earlier, it starts out tangled, proceeds a bit roughly (not helped by Jetta or other characters, who tend to withhold vital information until it's too late and also are not immune to boneheaded moments), and ends on an uncertain note that practically demands a sequel, though there is no other indication that this is a multi-part story. Intercuts present other points of view in scriptlike notation, letter and telegram excerpts, and occasional snatches of song, a conceit that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Heilig presents some interesting ideas and a world with potential, but at some point I realized I just could not care about it or the people who lived there.
(As a closing note, I will say that the cover art is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while.)

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