Six-year-old me sat with her chin on the kitchen counter staring at the yogurt inches from her face the artificial fruit smells radiating from the container. What happened was I discovered cantaloupe flavored yogurt at the store and begged my mom to buy some for me. Cantaloupe melons were a favorite of mine so I knew the yogurt was going to be delicious, right?
I have read two other books by Adiheh, The Wrath and the Dawn and Flames in the Mist, and enjoyed them. I discovered my appreciation for her writing so I wanted to Smoke in the Sun to be good almost as badly as I wanted to like that cantaloupe yogurt. Throughout the book I found myself thinking, I don’t really like this, but I tried to like it anyway.
I’ll start with the two things I did like: Raiden and Yumi. Both characters seemed the most believable and human out of the entire cast. The frustrations they experienced felt real and watching them find their ways around their problems were my favorite chapters out of whole novel.
The narration suffers from too many characters’ point of views. Mariko is supposed to be the main character, but I don’t think her voice was even the focus of slightly more than half the novel. The biggest drawback to this is the influence it has on Mariko’s character. Towards the latter end of the halfway point, she stops feeling like a character and more like a robot with the sole purpose of making certain this book’s message is drilled into the audience. I don’t recall any of the final chapters being written from her perspective. However, Mariko is present in many of the scenes written from other characters’ points of view, some of those scenes could simply have been shifted so that Mariko was the lead without overhauling the plot.
Speaking of the plot, it slowly builds up the first hundred pages being a drag to get through but suddenly exploding in the readers face the last fifteen pages or so. When I reviewed Black Key, I doubted I could find an ending with more loose threads. The ending of Smoke in the Sun read like a Wikipedia summary which hurts because I know it could’ve been better with more time spent on it.
The antagonists were horrible not only because of what they did but how they were written. Roku was an awful villain who felt like he came from a bad samurai film. However, as much as I despised Roku, Kanako was worst. However, explaining why is a bit of a spoiler so would recommend skipping this paragraph if you haven’t read Smoke in the Sun, but want to read this book. *Spoiler*Although Roku killed and tortured people, he did suffer a terrible death, supposedly it was written kind of weirdly, Kanako was eviler. Not only did she torture and kill people, she took away their free will and trapped them inside their own bodies, and made them fight against other innocent people who had no other choice but to kill these possessed souls to save themselves. Nobody realizes Kanako was the puppet master. She dies in the end, but her death wasn’t satisfying, and I felt she was treated sympathetically. That she-demon even achieves her lifelong goal in the end! *End of Spoilers*
I wanted to like this book because of how much I enjoyed the one before it. However, I can’t and shouldn’t say something is good even when it has bits of things I like. Smoke in the Sun has a jumbled story, a rushed final, and a horrible lack of justice at the end. It’s not the final fitting for Flames in the Mist and that is a real bummer.
