2nd book in a trilogy

An Uneven Adventure in Riordan’s “The Throne of Fire”

After the somewhat scattered conflict in The Red Pyramid, the first installment of Rick Riordan’s Egyptian mythology-inspired Kane Chronicles, The Throne of Fire, its sequel, has a bit of cleaning up to do.

It’s no secret that Riordan’s series tend to start okay and end fantastic––the vast gulf in mastery between The Lightning Thief and The Last Olympian attests to it––but The Red Pyramid seemed particularly unfocused. Cycling through mentors and fetch quests as it does, it denies itself both the camaraderie of a usual quest story and a truly satisfying ending, which doesn’t bode well for The Throne of Fire, a tome of comparable length and at least as many macguffins.

If you persevered through The Red Pyramid, though, take heart: The Throne of Fire swerves cleanly away from many of its predecessor’s pitfalls, the result being a tale with both strong sinews and thrills of its own to offer, if not awe-inspiring efficiency.

In the few months since the events of The Red Pyramid, Carter and Sadie Kane, the children of famous archaeologist and secret magician Julius Kane, have set up camp at Brooklyn House, now a clandestine training facility for the next generation of sorcerers, hiding in the mortal world in plain sight. As before, the threat of total annihilation looms in the form of one chaos snake Apophis, who resides in a magical prison but gets closer by the minute to breaking free.

In order to stop him, the Kane siblings have hatched a plan to stir the sun god Ra from his aeons of slumber, but in order to do so, they must fetch the three portions of the Book of Ra, at least one from under the nose of the magical establishment, which hasn’t been too keen on our intrepid protagonists since they shook things up in book one.

As always, Riordan has buckets of fun adapting the elements of ancient lore to his style of comedy, and even if it’s not quite up to Percy Jackson‘s par (what is, honestly?), it offers the familiar, crowd-pleasing fun of an adventurous blockbuster, and with the extra burden of foundational worldbuilding and initiation already taken care of, the book moves at a brisk but practiced pace, with some extra room for the quieter, character-heavy lulls that Riordan happens to excel at.

With the new recruits at Brooklyn House featuring heavily at the beginning, though, it’s a bit of a surprise that they’re so sparse in the rest of the book. Instead of fellow magicians for companions, Riordan has Carter and Sadie seek out the remaining Book of Ra fragments with the god Bes, another mentor figure to add to the Kane Chronicles‘ extensive collection.

In execution, he’s a perfectly enjoyable addition to the traveling party, but as his part plays out at the climax, there’s a looming sacrifice that you can see coming; one that echoes, albeit faintly, an issue at the heart of The Red Pyramid. It’s a flaw that plagues many a fantasy series, especially in the middle grade and young adult categories, and it saps the magic of its narrative power with astonishing speed:

The Kane Chronicles, my friends, has a stakes problem.

So far, Riordan has only been willing to sacrifice mentor characters he’s set aside for that specific purpose, and even then, in terms of losses, he’s been rather stingy. It’s not that every fantasy novel has to come with a mountain of casualties, but if the fate of the world is at stake, you can’t expect a bulletproof cast of supporting characters to do the trick, and, furthermore, you can’t expect the toll of The Throne of Fire‘s conclusion to cut it going into book three.

Which is why, as big a change as it would’ve meant for the manuscript, it might have been better for one of the named characters from the beginning to accompany the Kane siblings on their quest for the Book of Ra…and proceed to bite it. The loss of a fellow young magician would’ve been a punishing answer to our co-protagonists’ first steps into leadership; a more forbidding final note, certainly, than the one we got.

The second installment of a trilogy will often end with a shocking defeat (think The Empire Strikes Back or Catching Fire), and with Apophis gearing up to end the world on the last page, it’s storytelling negligence on Riordan’s part to deny the trilogy its dark night of the soul right where it was most needed. Now, as big as the threat is, and as much danger as it’s meant to pose, I still don’t believe it capable of making our heroes hurt.

Luckily, however, Riordan adds the spice of earthly conflict to temper the larger celestial one. The House of Life, sorcery’s primary authority, has a Chief Lector in Michel Desjardins who is neither entirely friend nor entirely foe. In between monster fights and wild goose chases through various world cities, we get glimpses of an ancient institution fraying at the edges, its leadership in jeopardy and its priorities ill-chosen.

Though the House of Life’s woes don’t take up much of The Throne of Fire’s page time, it wouldn’t be nearly as rich without them, and a certain development near the end suggests a greater presence of this subplot in the trilogy’s concluding volume. It’s really the complexity in this institutional conflict that makes it the powerful foil to the epic good-evil apotheosis it is, and when Riordan plays it right, it hits with the same resonance, if not more.

Whether the trilogy sticks the landing remains to be seen, but with the tools at hand, Riordan has a chance to make it so. And if his stories are anything to go by, a chance is no small thing.

I Still Love “P.S. I Still Love You”

Jenny Han’s widely loved To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before introduces us to hopeless romantic and scaredy-cat Lara Jean Song Covey, who moons over her crushes in secret, terrified of little more than to have her feelings known. Letters, her charmingly analog method of wrangling her heart’s desires, are in order for every object of affection. Never to be read, they contain her vulnerabilities, longings, and deepest, most embarrassing secrets. They remain hidden in a hatbox, nestled in the recesses of her closet. Until they aren’t. Chaos ensues.

In the fallout of this disaster, To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before gives us fake-dating goodness, high school nostalgia, and a really genuine instance of character development––as Lara Jean emerges from her shell, we really want to root for her, and though a lot of her growth is romantic, it also manifests elsewhere, yielding a full portrait that, along with Han’s conversational, detail-oriented writing, feels real, albeit in a reality with brighter colors, warmer feelings, and far fewer dark nights of the soul.

By the time of P. S. I Still Love You, set in January and February of Lara Jean’s junior year (To All The Boys starts in September), Lara Jean is dating one of the recipients of the forbidden letters (Peter Kavinsky, a lacrosse player), close friends with another (Lucas, who she danced with at homecoming freshman year), and has reconciled things with a third (Josh, her neighbor, and sister’s ex-boyfriend). One letter met the wrong address and has since returned, but another’s whereabouts are still unknown, addressed to one nerdy and subdued John Ambrose McClaren, yet to garner a reply.

Some tension in the first act of the book arises from romantic misunderstandings between Lara Jean and Peter––for one thing, he’s still rather close to his ex, Genevieve, and for another, there’s a video of Lara Jean and Peter’s first for-real kiss going around on social media, and the rumor mill has latched onto word that it went beyond kissing, smacking the two with looks of suspicion from classmates, unsolicited words of advice from adults, and campus meme status, which, Han, for all of her allegiance to slightly outdated popularity- and mean girl-based school politics, manages to depict pretty faithfully.

This subplot, which was bumped back to the third act of To All The Boys in the 2018 film adaptation, provokes some petty drama among the characters that can feel trite on occasion, especially with regards to Genevieve, but Han often takes care to make sure it comes from a deeper place, and paints insightful pictures of all the interactions that build up to a big spat––all the little decisions Lara Jean makes when she’s with Peter, to let things slide, to swallow her objections––and it’s ultimately really convincing when the consequences of these moments add up, and boil over.

But the tension in P.S. I Still Love You, possibly as a symptom of YA’s early-2010’s love triangle boom, is at its best when yet another love interest is added to the mix, in the form of the missing fifth addressee, John Ambrose McClaren.

He enters the happenings rather late for a supporting figure so crucial, but the way Han offers him as a foil for Peter is well-suited to the task at hand, both in terms of personality, as a more observant, mild-mannered alternative to Peter’s boisterous, jockish sensibilities, and in terms of relationship progression, offering a squeaky-clean, early phase relief from the complications time has given Lara Jean’s relationship with Peter.

How Han resolves these contradictions makes sense for her goals and for Lara Jean’s needs as a character, but she neglects to give both relationships proper time for their culminations. Instead, the third act of P. S. I Still Love You feels like it’s been slashed through the middle and hastily stitched together in the aftermath. After making a key decision, Lara Jean has time to feel only fleeting regret before going back on it, her connection with John doesn’t have enough space to mature, and things overall get resolved in a hurry, as if P. S. I Still Love You is trying desperately to alienate itself from uncertainty, even though that same uncertainty is what made its predecessor so rich.

But it has one particular element to its name that does give it an ever-so slight leg up. With John Ambrose’s reply comes the bitter pang of nostalgia––Lara Jean, Peter, John Ambrose, and Genevieve all used to be friends back in middle school, and Han pays the most compassionate, delicate attention to the painful fraying of these bonds, particularly for someone as prone to living in the past as Lara Jean. As in everything else that makes this series so delectable, it’s all in the details. The buried time capsule. The friendship bracelets. The words left unsaid.

Tell me what you think! Hit me up in the comments☟
Next week: I go off about Avatar: The Last Airbender.

A Dystopian Trek in Ally Condie’s “Crossed”

Ally Condie’s YA dystopia, Crossed, and how it works as a sequel to the sleek, sanitized, Giver-esque world of Matched, its predecessor. (With a touch of poetry!)

*Crossed*, the second book in the *Matched* trilogy, sees Cassia, a heroine who only until recently trusted the word of her overbearing government, in a journey through the wilderness, in search of love, freedom, and a rebellion. Credits for this illustration are here.

Ally Condie’s 2010 YA dystopian, Matched, takes place in a highly-regulated, warped paradise of job assignments, planned deaths, and compulsory conformity, the workings of a faceless, monolithic Society in the far future, Giver-style. The Matching ceremony, the day on which the government presents to each citizen their predestined partner, plays a key role in getting Cassia, a familiar subdued, brunette, mostly complicit dystopian heroine, to question the system that’s kept her life safe and predictable lo these seventeen years, but by the end, she’s taken a second look at everything. The Society’s destruction of previous cultures. Its zero-tolerance approach to dissent. And, most urgently, at the end of book one, its swift and hushed deployment of her boyfriend, Ky, as a prop of its vague and unspoken war.

Crossed, book two, is the fallout of the possibility of resistance. In Matched, we follow a relationship mutually acknowledged to be doomed. In Crossed, where both Ky and Cassia are on the run, they have to deal with disagreements about the future they only recently realized they could have. What’s more, Cassia hears word of a rebellion brewing on the edges of the Society, the very one in which Ky, jaded by his family’s past, long ago lost faith.

It’s subdued and rather uneventful as far as sequels go––the Society, in Crossed, is more of a looming presence than, as it is in Matched, a mounting threat. In Crossed, Ky and Cassia, along with a few incidental others, trek through the wilderness to find each other, and, eventually, to find the already gathering forces of a rebellion, the Rising. This setup forebodes a laggy, unimportant middle chapter, but Crossed has a utility in doing what a plot summary would cast as useless loitering. It holds all the themes of Matched while taking some time to let the immediate danger of being pursued by authority air out in the wilderness. The same stakes are ultimately at hand, but they are examined here in a deeply personal lens. What’s more, the monotony of the Society ripens with an example to pair it against. Where the Society does appear in Crossed, Condie inextricably associates it with the destruction of the natural world, further codifying its slick, sterilized aesthetic: just the foil for the naturalism, figurative language, and poetry that defines her main characters, and their deeply-held, almost unconscious, need to rebel.

As either consequence or catalyst of this, Condie’s prose style is of the earnest, flowery variety, sparse yet heavy with metaphor: so much “ash and nothing into flesh and blood,” so much “a thought flitters into my mind like one of the mourning cloaks, the butterflies that string their cocoons along the twigs,” so much “my mother painted with water, and my father played with fire,” as to render it trite, cliché, and unbearably cheesy, but her characters are so fervent and her argument for agency so entangled with poetry and passion that it registers with striking clarity. The key to Condie’s invoking such drastic lyricism is commitment.

It doesn’t hurt, though, that she chose to set Crossed in the dramatic landscape of a canyon, the Carving, where bright red cliffs exist in stark relief beside dark, rushing waters, and consequently where her lofty prose style feels most at home. Ky, the melancholy, poetry-reading love interest, also happens to harmonize with the landscape––Condie makes it the site of his childhood and the tenuous middle ground of the issue that comes to define his newfound tension with Cassia: to, or not to, join the Rising. What Crossed does with the debate is a cut above the expected. Yes, it’s a dystopian trilogy, and the rebellion is a given, but where Cassia’s all in, Ky is rather uneasy, and what’s more, the Rising is far from the “natural” side in Condie’s natural-unnatural dystopian lexicon, and she foreshadows some discord between the Rising as a restrictive institution and the beliefs of the people who turn to it for hope. Two salvaged poems, Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar,” play a key role in the series, Cassia and Ky reciting parts of them like mantras. The Rising, however, has co-opted the metaphorical figure of the Pilot from Tennyson’s poem for use in their own propaganda, and it is only Ky’s suspicions––with his symbolic ties to the natural, the expressive, and the artistic––that put dents in the Rising’s promises before the thing itself even appears.

Cassia, on the other hand, is earnest and hopeful about this matter, nursing wholehearted faith in the future––and meets heartache when Ky doesn’t share her vision. She isn’t fully realized as a novel or startling heroine, but she is a fully-realized reflection of her upbringing, the Society’s purported ideals of justice and equality activated when they meet their authentic counterparts. The point is that she embodies the average of her circumstances reacting to a chance encounter with freedom, just like Ky embodies his ostracism, and reflects the want of creative freedom once had, and lost. This doesn’t make them boring or flat; it makes them painstaking extensions of their worldbuilding.

Likewise, Crossed‘s muted and internal nature doesn’t make it a pointless victim of middle book syndrome; it makes it a refreshing departure from a genre that demands armed conflict as resolution, and very rarely shifts all or most of its focus into how its characters feel about the matter. It’s a volume of careful thought and sustained commitment to its role as a meditative interlude. High-octane expectations gave the book mixed reviews upon its reception in 2011, but after YA’s wave of dystopian popularity has crashed, it’s worth revisiting what Crossed does with setting, character, and art: it takes a long, introspective trek through a canyon, as opposed to the straight and narrow path.

Thank you for reading! My name is Pippin, and this blog is my passion project for all things bookish (and, to be frank, mostly young adult sci-fi). I’d love to chat about this book, or anything else, really, in the comments: am I blinded by my teenage nostalgia for this book? Am I missing a killer dystopia that more people should read? Is Ky Markham too angsty? Tell me below!

“The White Rose” Blooms in the Shadow of “The Jewel”

At the close of the first installment of Amy Ewing’s Lone City trilogy, Violet, a surrogate of the upper-class in a violent and corrupt dystopia, has just landed in scalding hot water with her mistress, the cruel and calculating Duchess of the Lake.

Young women prepare to seize control of an isolated dystopian government’s natural resources in Amy Ewing’s sequel to The Jewel, *The White Rose.* Collage by Pippin Hart. Photo credits for components used in this post.

For reasons that explicitly spoil the first book, The White Rose follow Violet and a downtrodden ensemble of other servants and surrogates as they flee the royal inner circle of the Jewel for a safe house in the vast, quiet farming district, with the burdensome strings of possible revolution attached.

All things considered, this second book follows the expected trajectory of a dystopian series fairly closely. The subtlety of The Jewel is quickly ushered away into the margins in favor of a much more explosive kind of storytelling––the first half of the book, at surface, is a ceaseless rush of running, hiding, and smuggling, with short interludes where the characters screw it up.

But on closer inspection, The White Rose still has richness to offer, even as the mystery and intrigue of the first book falls away.

The concealed-history reveal regarding the Lone City’s origins is what saves this installment’s world-building from falling to the wayside as the revolution plot takes the spotlight: even as Ewing draws conclusions for her novel’s current affairs, her use of history keeps adding to the dimensions of her world. Unearthing records becomes The White Rose‘s chief asset as it concerns plot twists, and Ewing’s choices in the dark past of her dystopian land on a familiar note that echoes the real world, but leaves enough room for the Lone City to become something of its own, without the burden of conforming to allegory.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the thing that sets Ewing’s series apart from other miserable un-futures is her addition of a magical element. In the first book, it’s a set of abilities called the Auguries that allow the surrogates to bear children quickly and with the royalty’s preferences for appearance. Here, though, a much deeper and broader outgrowth of the natural world comes to the fore, more like the Star Wars-style force than the codified skill system that the surrogates have been taught to exhaust and abuse.

The underlying truth behind the Auguries illuminates the failings in a system that treats people like products the way that the Auguries themselves and the pain they cause acted like a proxy for forced childbirth––bringing unspeakable pain to the physical realm, where it can be described, inspected, and reckoned with. In this regard, dark dystopia and fantasy fit together beautifully, with the technical, clinical, cold aesthetic going up against the ancient, natural one. In the plot to overthrow and exploitative royalty, Ewing decides to tap into something much older, lending her work the mystical power of a fantasy, while escaping, like Star Wars does, the call to fully explain the magic and its origins, and keeping a gritty, modern, sci-fi edge.

Violet’s doubts about her ability to tap into this power appear, logically, but this development’s shadows on the supporting cast are much more interesting and well-defined: the minor players and their pasts, hesitations, and ideas about the revolt are possibly the only areas where the second book notably exceeds the first.

Raven, the best friend Violet was parted from when she came into the service of the Duchess of the Lake, gets a comprehensive treatment in this volume, where we finally see the fabric binding them together more closely. As the sharper, fiercer foil to Violet’s more subdued strength, she has to come to terms with her own servitude and how completely it took those things from her, a subplot Ewing handles generously, and further enriches by pouring it into magic.

A few times, Ewing fails to commit to the scuffles the characters encounter as they make their escape from the Jewel––and uses Raven’s abilities to get them out unscathed––but ultimately, The White Rose doesn’t neglect her. The most vital relationship in this novel isn’t a romantic pairing; it’s the love between Violet and her best friend. It’s into this relationship that Ewing pours the heart-felt confessions, the sacrifices, the solemn promises, and as a result, the whole book benefits.

Garnet, the Duchess of the Lake’s ne’er-do-well (depending on who you ask) son, also sees a deep, thought-provoking character arc in The White Rose, Ewing combining his privilege with a desire to make amends that lends him both earnestness and biting self-awareness. Raven and Violet’s bond may be the most important character element in the book, but in a stunning turn of events, this sardonic agent of moderate chaos steps out to become book two’s scene-stealer, what, with his quips and surprising glimpses of heroism and slowly-emerging conviction. He’s like the Effie Trinket of this trilogy, mixed with a few extra drops of vinegar.

The truly wide range of characters in Ewing’s vision is beginning to show as one of her work’s closely-held triumphs. The rebellion on its own isn’t a particularly innovative use of the idea, but the wide array of characters and motivations she uses to propel it forward (and their begrudging cooperation) is very nearly worth it all. In a particularly valuable exchange, Ash, one of the characters on the run with Violet and company, brings up the girl he was hired as an escort for, the Duchess’ niece, Carnelian. He remarks on the fact that for all the heartache she caused them, she, too, has suffered at the hands of the royalty, and then says something that really expands the scope of the revolution, and gives it the means to matter. “We can’t choose who we free from them, Violet,” he tells her, as he comes into his own. “It has to be all or nothing.”