Smoke in the Sun (Flame in the Mist, #2)

by Renée Ahdieh

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Out of all the authors I’ve ever read a book by, Reneé Ahdieh has got to be the one who gave me the weirdest experience.

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When I was reading book one, I enjoyed the first half of the book but I didn’t enjoy the second one all that much. In book two, I had the exact opposite experience of that. It took me six days to get to 50% of it, but only a few hours to get through the final 50%. All in all, I’ll say that I’m more disappointed than not with this book because it might’ve been way more interesting if it focused on the intriguing magic it showed snippets of in the prequel instead of focusing on useless things. In Smoke in the Sun, Reneé Ahdieh combined the usual build up second book of trilogies with the third wrapping up book in a single one which is not a bad idea at all, but it still makes me wish that she focused on the things that made this book interesting.

The plot is building up to the conclusion in the first half, but there are a little too many POVs for my taste being showcased throughout of it. While a couple of them were interesting, the majority were unfortunately pretty annoying for me. Mariko for instance didn’t change at all from book 1, she still ended up learning the same exact lesson from the first book, showing us a deeper look into the castle and the proceedings, still continued trying to use her mind to get out of sticky situations with little to no success and not to forget that she was still stuck in the stupid romance that happened in Book 1, which still doesn’t make a shred of sense to me. Okami is probably one of the most pathetic characters I’ve ever had the displeasure of seeing, I hate when a lot of hope is riding on someone who doesn’t deserve it, who doesn’t aim to make something of it despite the power to do so and more importantly, someone who needs to be pushed to take a stand when there is another who is way more deserving of it just a step away.

Yumi and Kanako were easily the most interesting characters in the series for me and I desperately wanted to learn more about their side of things than not, but that obviously never happened. Now the second half of the book with all of these characters was far more engaging than the first half, for wrapping the story on one hand, but for also showing me that all of that build up will eventually lead to something on the other. The annoying thing here though is that not every single recurring character had a showcased conclusion which makes it a pointless open end to add to a duology that already ended imo, I mean the actual ending of the series could be seen from a mile away about 5 chapters in the book, but still, I hoped for a more close ended conclusion than not.

The writing of the book still felt like it was as if a bunch of philosophers were trading their views on the topic at hand, but other than that I have no issues with the writing. Tbh, her description of the setting and the addition of the Japanese words when needed was one of the only pluses this book got from me throughout my reading. I appreciate the way she went about this with the language, but honestly the way she fused the romance in this book makes it a very tiring one to get through without rolling and sighing every five seconds. I get the fact that this is a YA, but this level of devotion after a couple of months is just a load of bs when those 2 months were mostly spent hating each other. But as always, I’m most likely in the minority with this one.

With this I’m done with the book and the series, there are actually two novellas in between the books that I read, but I don’t really see a reason to include my thoughts in bigger details when they felt more pointless than anything else. Would I ever read another of her series at some point? I’m honestly not sure in the long run, but at the moment I’d like to focus on others I’m most likely going to enjoy more.

Final rating: 2/5