Fire Study: Study, #3 -- Maria V. Snyder
Ooookay, apparently I never wrote about Magic Study, the second book in this series. How odd. I read it ages ago.
Anyway. Book Three.
Yelena is now the official liaison between Sitia, where she is studying with the Magician's Council, and Ixia, her former home. She is still having difficulties with the Council due to the animosity and distrust of Roze Featherstone, First Magician... who is of the opinion that Yelena should be put to death because her magic is too powerful. That situation, while trying, would be manageable, but Yelena is also extremely concerned about the escape of the eeeevil murderer/rapist/magic stealer Ferde. And she still has A LOT to learn about her own capabilities and limits. And she hasn't seen Valek in months.
And there's someone or something that is attacking her through fire -- an element that Yelena has no control over.
I absolutely loved Poison Study. Magic Study I enjoyed quite a lot. Fire Study, I thought, was pretty weak. While at first I somewhat enjoyed revisiting the characters and the world, I didn't seem to connect this time, and thus, ultimately wasn't very particularly diverted or entertained. Ironically enough, Fire Study didn't seem to have the spark that the other two -- especially the first one -- did. That might be partially because there was so little interaction between Yelena and Valek this time around -- while I understand that both from plotting and character development angles, they needed to be separated, their few scenes were the ones that really stood out for me.
I felt that there was quite a lot of repetition* -- not just in rehashing Yelena's previous adventures, but in then rehashing the rehash or in explaining and then re-explaining the explanation of the magic system or political landscape. Which was distracting.
All in all, I think my problem with this installment of Yelena's story was that, as I said, I didn't connect. There was plenty of action, but because I didn't really care about the characters -- including Yelena, the narrator -- very much, I never worried about the outcome. So it just seemed to me that the characters just rode back and forth a lot, got into fights, and then jumped on their horses and rode somewhere else. Which got, well, boring. And that's depressing, considering how much I cared before.
I'm curious about Maria V. Snyder's upcoming series, which looks like it will be set in the same world and will be about one of the minor characters in this series. A decent part of Fire Study acted as set up for it, actually, which may have been part of the problem -- maybe I stopped caring because there was just so much going on and the focus was on the plot instead of a balance between that and the relationships between the characters -- maybe I just didn't have time enough with the characters to care.
It's very possible that these are my own issues, that I just read it on the wrong day -- but either way, I'm sad about my reaction. I wanted to love it like I loved Poison Study.
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*Which seems to be true of quite a lot of my recent reads, unfortunately.
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Previously: