Review: Cold Fire, by Kate Elliott

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Sun May 26 19:21:53 PDT 2019


Cold Fire
by Kate Elliott

Series:    Spiritwalker #2
Publisher: Orbit
Copyright: September 2011
ISBN:      0-316-19635-5
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     512

Cold Fire is the sequel to Cold Magic and picks up directly where the
last book left off. Elliott does a good job reminding the reader of the
events in the previous book, but as the second book in a series with
strong trilogy structure, it's not a good place to start.

The story opens with more political intrigue. Cat, Bea, and Rory meet,
somewhat more formally, the force behind the political radicals, who
comes complete with intimidating prophecies about the role of Cat and
Bea in upcoming political upheavals. This is followed by some startling
revelations about the headmaster of the school Cat and Bea were
attending at the start of Cold Magic, which cast the politics of this
series in a new and more complicated light. But before long, Cat is
thrown into the spirit world for a frightening, revealing, and ominous
confrontation with an entirely different power, and from there to
literally the other side of the world.

The challenge of a trilogy is always what to do in the second book. The
first book introduces the characters and lays the groundwork of the
story, and the third book is the conclusion towards which the whole
series builds. The second book is... awkward. The plot needs to move
forward to keep the reader engaged, so it needs some intermediate
climax, but it can't resolve the central conflict of the series. The
problem is particularly acute when the trilogy is telling a single
story split across three books, as is the case here. Elliott takes one
of the limited choices: throw the protagonist into an entirely
different side quest that can have its own climax without resolving the
main plot.

That side quest involves this world's version of the Caribbean, an
introduction to a much different type of magic than the two (or
arguably three) seen so far, and the salt plague. Cat washes up with
little but the clothes on her back, in the worst possible location, and
has to navigate a new social structure, a new set of political
complexities, and an entirely foreign culture, all while caught in a
magical geas. The characters from the first book do slowly filter back
into the story, but Cat has to rely primarily on her own ingenuity and
her own abilities.

I know very little about the region and therefore am not the reviewer
to comment on Elliott's Caribbean, although I do think she was wise (as
she mentions in the book) to invent an entirely fictional patois rather
than trying to adopt one from our world. I can say that the political
situation follows the overall trend of this series: what if no one ever
decisively won a war, and every culture remained in an uneasy standoff?
This story takes place in Expedition (referred to a few times in the
first book): a carved-out enclave of independent local rule that serves
as a buffer between traders from Cat's Europe and a powerful local
civilization built on substantial fire magic. The trolls are here too
and play a significant role, although this is not their home. The
careful balance of power, and the lack of conquest or significant
colonialism, feel refreshingly different. Elliott manages to pull off
combining that world with the threat of a version of the Napoleonic
Wars without too much cognitive dissonance, at least for me.

The strength of this book is its ability to portray the simmering anger
and hope of rebellion and radicalism. The background politics are
clearly inspired by the French Revolution and the subsequent popular
uprisings such as the June Rebellion (known in the US primarily due to
Les Miserables), and they feel right to me. Society is fractured along
class fault lines, people are careful about what they say and to whom,
radicals meet semi-openly but not too openly, and the powers-that-be
periodically try to crush them and re-establish dominance. But beneath
the anger and energy is an excited, soaring optimism, a glimpse at a
possible better world to fight for, that I enjoyed as an emotional
backdrop to Cat's story.

That said, none of this moves the plot of the first book forward very
far, which is a little unsatisfying. We're given some significant
revelations about the world at the very start of this book, and pick up
the fraught political maneuverings and multi-sided magical conflict at
the end of the book, but the middle is mostly Cat navigating
friendships and social judgment. Oh, and romantic tensions.

It was obvious from the first book that this was going to turn into a
romance of the "bicker until they fall in love" variety. I'm somewhat
glad Elliott didn't drag that out into the third book, since I find the
intermediate stages of those romances irritating. But that means
there's a lot of conflicted feelings and people refusing to talk to
each other and miscommunication and misunderstanding and apparent
betrayal in this book. It's all very dramatic in a way that I found a
little eye-roll-inducing, and I would have preferred to do without some
of the nastier periods of blatant miscommunication. But Elliott does
even more work to redeem Andevai, and I continue to like Cat even when
she's being an idiot. She has the substantial merits of erring on the
side of fighting for what she believes and being unable to stay quiet
when she probably should.

I think this was a bit weaker than Cold Magic for primarily structural
reasons, and it ran into a few of my personal dislikes, but if you
liked the first book, I think you'll like this as well. Both Cat and
Bea have grown and changed substantially since the first book, and are
entering the final book with new-found confidence and power. I'm
looking forward to the conclusion.

Followed by Cold Steel.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2019-05-26

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-316-19635-5.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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