Kindling (Traci Chee)

Kindling
Traci Chee
Clarion
Fiction, YA Action/Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: When nation fought nation on the Kindar peninsula, kindlers were the ultimate weapon: boys and girls with special gifts focused by balar crystals, unleashing powers to protect or destroy... but at a steep cost. For to use their magic, kindlers burned up their futures, days or months or years, few surviving past their teens. Thus, they were found and trained young, sacrificed as heroes in the name of glory - until the arrival of gunpowder and hand cannons rendered them obsolete almost overnight, followed by the end of the war with Amerand's victory. The long tradition of kindler warriors was outlawed as "barbaric", and those left alive were cast aside to wander in a world that no longer wanted or needed them.
In a small backwater near the mountains, a desperate young woman seeks help. Her village of Camas has been plagued by a pack of bandits who raid the mountain passes and keep her people on the very knife-edge of starvation with their raids and demands for tribute, to the point where they may not survive the coming winter on the scraps left behind. All ignore her pleas... all except for a handful of kindlers, all of whom have fallen on their own hard times, carrying their own scars. Can they remember and honor their old war codes to defend the helpless, or is the old age of heroes and magic truly gone from the land?

REVIEW: Kindling crosses the brutal reality of child soldiers with the familiar storyline exemplified by classics such as The Magnificent Seven, where a small band of antiheroes is gathered for one last shot at redemption (a shot where not everyone is guaranteed survival, let alone success), all told in a second-person present tense perspective (that's actually a first-person plural, from a sort of collective ghostly or spiritual host that focuses on each would-be hero in turn). Does it work? In general, yes, though at some point it started wallowing in its own trauma, gore, and helpless misery (not helped by rotating audiobook narrators who sometimes lean a little hard into the emotion and gulping, traumatic hesitations) to the point where it ultimately lost a half-star in the rating.
After a brief overview of the setup and setting, the tale opens with the classic trope of a stranger drifting into town and a young woman in distress (even though the latter's pleas are initially dismissed by the former, who doesn't want to get caught up in other people's problems when her own shoulders are nearly broken under the weight of her own troubles as it is). Not until a second stranger turns up - this one a former war hero of formidable skill - that the first character gets pulled into the plot/problem, drawn as much by the magnetism and authority embodied in the legendary "Twin Valley Reaper" as stubborn loyalty to the old kindler Codes of war that nobody, not even fellow kindlers, seems to remember, let alone honor; the leader of the mountain raider band is herself a former kindler, choosing to use her training to harass and kill innocent civilians rather than defend them. Of the seven would-be heroes, six of them cope with post-traumatic stress in various unhealthy ways, while the seventh is a cadet who was mere weeks from graduating and following her dream of becoming a true kindler on the battlefield when peace was declared and wrecked her future; this lattermost character was rather over-the-top in her childish innocence and eagerness to join her elders (in experience if not quite years; all of the characters are under 20, though war aged them all decades and kindlers were never expected to live to see their twentieth birthday anyway), actively envying their clearly broken lives and restless nights full of nightmares and completely ignorant why they'd resist finishing her training and letting her join them in slaughter even after she finally bloodies her blade and realizes (or seems to, for about half a minute) that death leaves a mark on the soul. (Why are they holding out on the big "secret" that binds them all like kin, she whines to them more than once, even as she sees them struggling...) All of them are looking to redeem themselves or prove something, to the ghosts of their past if nobody else, by joining the cause to defend Camas... and all fail themselves and their fellows more than once before finally coming together to show the village, the raiders, and the world that tried to erase them just what kindlers could do when united in common cause against evil.
You may notice a lack of names in this review; this was an audiobook I listened to, so I didn't catch spellings, and I'm having one heck of a time finding any but a couple names written down anywhere. They are distinct characters, and are generally interesting if not always likeable, save when they're repetitiously wallowing in their own miseries and clinging stubbornly to ideas and attitudes that not only aren't working but which might get other people killed. I was ready to smack each of them upside the head at least once, particularly when some terrible thing was happening or mere moments away from happening and they were lost in bad memories or doom-and-gloom observations instead of, y'know, actually doing something - even the wrong thing, just something - about the terrible thing. I get that this was part of the point, exemplified by how the power of kindling is quite literally about children being burned on the pyre of war for the sake of nations and leaders who not only consider their lives disposable, but who ignore and erase them as soon as it becomes politically convenient. Even given that, though, Kindling feels like it hammers those ideas, and the traumas of its characters, past the point of effectiveness, the end of the nail coming out the far side and catching up the story from telling itself.

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