Ashley
Written on Jul 2, 2014
I started out LOVING The Fire Artist. The idea of elemental magic as a performance art—almost like a sport actually—was very interesting. Then you bring Genies into the mix and it's almost like baseball and steroids.
Then an abuse element was introduced. Aria's father tried to force her to become a fire artist by burning her and trying to convince her that it didn't really hurt. Obviously that's horrible, but I thought it was a really unique and interesting way to introduce abuse. He never hit her, but he was so desperate to have a family full of elemental artists that he tried to force her to become a fire artist. Very interesting!
But then when she's recruited, things went downhill for me. The whole fire artist thing was put on the back burner while the romance dominated.. and the romance was pretty insta-lovey. There are two ways a genie can get his freedom: by the wisher wishing the genie free, or by the wisher falling in love with the genie. The latter is really tightly policed to weed out infatuation and crushes; it has to be true love and supposedly that's never happened before. But then naturally it happens in this book for the first time. But the romance itself wasn't LOVE. It was a crush. They knew each other for like a week. Sorry, but that wasn't love at all. That put me off the romance.
I think I just thought the book would be a lot more epic than it ended up being. In fact some of it was just pretty silly (I mean, her dad gets eaten... by an alligator). The whole thing came down to a half-baked romance. It would have been cooler if there was some kind of epic, elemental war.
Overall it was okay, but I think it could have been a lot better, especially since it started out so great!
On another note, the synopsis pretty much sums up 90% of the whole story, which is why I put some of it in spoiler tags. Luckily I didn't read it right before I read the book, so it wasn't totally ruined for me. But keep that in mind if you're considering picking this up.