Flame 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.