The Flame in the Mist, Kit Grindstaff

The Flame in the Mist
Kit Grindstaff
ISBN: 9780385742900
middle-grade fantasy: red-haired child escapes her evil ruling family to discover her true heritage, uses light to combat mist and murder.

Immediate Bonus Point Awards: Stand-Alone Fantasy, (Mostly) Competent Female Lead, No Mary Sues, (Almost) No Stupid Love Triangle, and Not-Dead Parents.

I feel like if I had read this when I was much younger - say around the time that I was devouring The Blue Sword, or The Hero and the Crown - I would have been way more excited about this.  As it is, it's very similar to both of those, to my (admittedly fuzzy) memories of Taash and the Jesters, to the spirit of the Bracken Trilogy... I could go on.  I just felt a little like I was riding a sightseeing train around a theme park.  Drive by this thing, drive by that thing, no sharp turns, no sudden drops or corkscrews, just a nice solid ride around the park.

The atmosphere is pretty solid, which is good, considering the conceit of an evil, enveloping, sunlight-blocking Mist, but the habit of inserting important capital letters  (Mist and Marked and Quest), odd portmanteau words (Approjection) and having a quaintly misspelled old book from history filled with anagrams to decipher (despite it being noted that they are quaintly misspelled - really good anagramist, that girl) all irked me personally a bit.  That's just a matter of taste.

On the other hand, I do have some niggles about the actual story and characters.

The ruling family is weak and infighting and decaying, and this is made obvious from the start.  This was probably on purpose to make them seem more an appropriate "challenge rating" for a 13 year old girl, but all it did was make me wonder what would have happened if everyone just moved away or into hiding and simply let the family go on for a few more years until they rotted out from the inside?

While I'm very happy to see the real parents not dead, I'm not so happy with the cloying super happy super supportive super loving family ideal that appears out of nowhere with a person they don't know, and haven't seen for 12 years, and who they've been living in pain and suffering and weakened ability waiting on her to get her act together and rescue not only herself but their Power (again with the capital letters) from the bad guys.  I just didn't buy it, and spent the entire book alternately gagging and waiting for the other shoe to drop.  (It never did - they really were that nice.)

Likewise, a post-climactic scene was resolved way too easily (trying to avoid real spoilers here) with the main characters using reason and appeals to humanity and morality.  Nope.  Especially in that situation, it rang entirely too false and trite and easy, and it soured the entire book up until then, which had been doing fairly well in that department by specifically talking about good and bad actions, and people being more complex than simply good or evil (not that it actually impacted the characterizations of the bad guys, who had at least a couple of solid one-note-villains present, and some late-arriving development for another that again rang pretty hollow.)

Finally, (and this one may also be a matter of taste) I get a little unhappy when our hero gets obsessed or taken over/literally possessed, or driven by dreams of hazy characters from the past who drive the protagonist towards the final confrontation (sometimes against the protagonist's will or personal judgment) who grant the protagonist the power and experience needed to combat evil, and who sometimes literally step into the final fight (either by possession or ghost presence or other methods) to "assist" and end up being the big guns in the fight.  Yes, it's a solid way to reasonably explain how a pre-teen manages to take down the evil empire where no one else could before.  Yes, it has great precedent: Star Wars (Use the Force, Luke!) and even in my previously referenced Damar novels.  I just feel like it takes away the agency and decision-making from the protagonist, and lets them off the hook too easily for the consequences (even the positive ones) of what are arguably NOT their own actions, being that they are under the influence or even outright control of other characters.  It bothers me especially when that protagonist is a girl, and then it gets into even more squicky territory of free will and agency as well as traditions in fantasy of silencing women and of characters getting "used" by more powerful forces.

So those are my really nitpicky irritations.

Despite all my griping, it was a well-paced and well-written stand-alone with a happy ending and a red-headed girl protagonist who is strong and brave and decently competent for her depicted age.