Smoke in the Sun: Review

     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. 

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. 

Spoiler Talk Part Two: What Counts as Spoilers?

 This is a sequel of sorts to another article I wrote, Whose Responsibility is it to Avoid Spoilers, if you missed out on that one you can check it out right here, but please finish this one first. :) http://charmingchum.blogspot.com/2018/03/spoiler-talk-part-one-who-is.html

      I and many people really only think of something as spoiled when we hear how it ends. If I learned a little bit about a subplot occurring later in the story, is that also a spoiler? I would say yes, but I enjoy going into a story blind so I can both try to guess what is going to happen next and to keep my expectations under control so what are some guidelines I use to pinpoint spoilers?

    If something isn’t in the trailer of a movie I consider it a spoiler. However, I don’t trust movie trailers anymore so I avoid them. For example, I knew I wasn’t going to see The Last Jedi until after Christmas and I had to quite the internet until then. I suppose I went a little too far as I refused to even watch the trailer until after I saw the movie. After seeing the trailer, I wondered why I thought it was going to spoil me because they did a good job not revealing important events from the end of the film. However, I am still not a person to watch trailers if I’m not forced to because I am at a movie theater.

  

  My personal opinion about what counts as a spoiler for books is if it isn’t in the synopsis and/or the first 20-45 pages (this is the length of most previews give or take a few pages) of the book then I consider it a spoiler. Although, this ground is a little shaky because sometimes a book’s synopsis will have spoilers. Spoiler Warning for Flames in the Mist if you haven’t read it yet I recommend you skip the next several sentences. The synopsis stated Mariko, the main character, was going to find love that will challenge everything she believes in. Although the character who Markio ended up falling in love with was introduced early in the story (within my 20-45-pages rule) there wasn’t any sexual tension until about 50 pages later and actual romance doesn’t begin until well over the second half of the book. This romance was an important plot point but doesn’t occur until the story is coming to a close. Because I knew Mariko would find love when I opened the front cover I continued to anticipate it, but I think I may have enjoyed the story more if I didn’t know what was going to happen. I would rather the question not be “When will Mariko find love?”, but “Will Mariko find love?”