Review in the Mist

     *note* I apologize for the bad pun for the title. My last final was yesterday and my brain is still recovering.

     Have you ever had a friend who started telling you about something that happened to him/her and he/she spends a little too much time on some details that aren’t relevant to the story? More often than I would have liked, I felt Flames in the Mist was similar to that friend’s story. There were chunks that could’ve been left out and nothing would have changed. It’s not like the book needs the length either; it’s almost 400 pages long. 

       There is this one chapter written from the Emperor’s (who are heroine, Mariko, has yet to meet) point of view and all the information I learned in that chapter was explained again in another chapter where Mariko was the focus. I honestly feel this story could’ve been told better if we don’t know what is happening outside of Mariko’s world. Several other chapters are written from the point of view of even more characters Mariko hasn’t met yet either and something Mariko doesn’t know about happens, but then a few chapters later Mariko learns about what happened to the other character and it doesn’t feel we needed the other point of view in the first place. 

       However, despite me thinking some chapters only dragged the plot on longer than necessary, I still really liked this book. It’s not one of my favorites, but it is worth a re-read and I do like Mariko as a character. I don’t think she’s super original fitting an archetype of a rebellious princess and all (I know her father is a samurai, but a character doesn’t exactly need to be a princess to be a rebellious princess). Mariko has a history as a character and she does think about events that happened to her before the story took place and I think this did good to flesh her out. I also enjoyed how the black clan felt like Robin Hood and the Merry Men in Japan, they even have a camp set up in the woods. 

      Spoiler Warning Major Spoilers ahead if you haven’t read Flames in the Mist yet I recommend skipping the next paragraph. 

       The romance. Oh boy, …where do I begin? The synopsis of this book says that Mariko “finds herself falling in love – a love that will force her to question everything she’s ever known about her family, her purpose, and her deepest desires.” I went into the story knowing Mariko would fall in love at some point. However, I didn’t get a hint of sexual tension until more than halfway through the book, but Mariko met the object of her affection, Okami, at the beginning of the story. I didn’t think Mariko was going to fall for him until a while after he was introduced. A very good thing in my opinion, but I still think their romance developed a little too quickly, and a few more scenes with the two of them alone may have been nice.  

      As much as I feel Mariko and Okami didn’t make the best decisions, and maybe some aspects of their relationship happened too quickly, I can’t help, but want them to be together. Maybe it was because the two didn’t instantly decide to spend the rest of their lives together, or maybe it was because they developed a sense of respect for each other before they fell in love. I think a huge factor was how Okami was a character first and a love interest second. As I stated before, when the character Okami was introduced I didn’t think Mariko was going to fall for him.