For a Muse of Fire by Heidi Heilig

For a Muse of Fire (Shadow Players, #1)

by Heidi Heilig

A young woman with a dangerous power she barely understands. A smuggler with secrets of his own. A country torn between a merciless colonial army, a terrifying tyrant, and a feared rebel leader.

The first book in a new trilogy from the acclaimed Heidi Heilig blends traditional storytelling with ephemera for a lush, page-turning tale of escape and rebellion. For a Muse of Fire will captivate fans of Sabaa Tahir, Leigh Bardugo, and Renée Ahdieh.

Jetta’s family is famed as the most talented troupe of shadow players in the land. With Jetta behind the scrim, their puppets seem to move without string or stick—a trade secret, they say. In truth, Jetta can see the souls of the recently departed and bind them to the puppets with her blood.

But ever since the colonizing army conquered their country, the old ways are forbidden, so Jetta must never show, never tell. Her skill and fame are her family’s way to earn a spot aboard the royal ship to Aquitan, where shadow plays are the latest rage, and where rumor has it the Mad Emperor has a spring that cures his ills—and could cure Jetta’s, too. Because seeing spirits is not the only thing that plagues her.

But as rebellion seethes and as Jetta meets a young smuggler, she will face truths and decisions that she never imagined—and safety will never seem so far away.

Heidi Heilig creates a vivid, rich world inspired by Asian cultures and French colonialism. Her characters are equally complex and nuanced, including the bipolar heroine. Told from Jetta’s first-person point-of-view, as well as with chapters written as play scripts and ephemera such as telegrams and letters, For a Muse of Fire is an engrossing journey that weaves magic, simmering romance, and the deep bonds of family with the high stakes of epic adventure.

Content warnings: Mental illness (bipolar), blood use in magic, gun violence, war, colonialism, racism, descriptions of dead bodies, mention of reproductive coercion, mentions of torture, mention of suicide

Reviewed by sa090 on

4 of 5 stars

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I have discovered that I have a nasty of habit of procrastinating when I don’t have all the books in my TBR in my disposal, because I still didn’t have Shadow of the Fox, my reading time for this one was longer than expected. But after I got Shadow of the Fox, I breezed through this without pause.

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So I’ve done it again, I have into a book where I didn’t completely read what it was going to be about to the same extent I should’ve, the cover is just too good for me and my dragon loving self. I didn’t really expect to see an Asian inspired story mixed in with a French colonialism of sorts, but I did think that the setting was interesting enough for me to continue with it. The world building in this story has some good parts to it, but it is also lacking in others. For example, we see multiple instances of Jetta’s usage of her special gifts and while the concept of this type of necromancy is not something I’m terribly ignorant about (Some background into Shinto religion and familiars with Onmyougi’s will surely make the image clearer to envision), the types of souls she was dealing with were mostly names on a page rather than actually tangible things for me to think about and recognize to a bigger extent. Because the concept and how Heidi Heilig wove it into the story was so interesting, I found it be a disheartening thing.

The usage of many many French words, sometimes in full sentences was also another thing I found to be disheartening. If you’re going to include another language into the book, then please just include a glossary in the back for people like me who actually have English as the only foreign language taught at school. I had the same issue with Mary Weber’s “The Disappearance of Sofi Snow” duology, but the saving grace here is that the language wasn’t just used for kicks and the story in For a Muse of Fire is way more interesting than the before mentioned. These two point cover the issues I had with the book so let me get on with the things I really enjoyed, firstly the fact that our main character, isn’t completely sane.

It’s my first time reading about a mentally ill person, and although her illness is not explicitly mentioned in the book to be more memorable, it’s seen through her actions once I got more familiar with her and the situations she was in later on in the book. Jetta is an interesting lead, her amazing abilities on one side and her fears on the other makes me really glad to see the main theme Heidi Heilig gave importance to; family. At the center of this book, the most important thing to Jetta are her parents and vice versa and to me personally it’s so hard to find a YA book recently where a female main character is actually more concerned about her family than a love interest. The other thing I will mention about this though is that Heidi Heilig didn’t forget Jetta’s parents when she wrote about hardships, they too had their fair share of them and dying to make it work regardless for the majority of the book even when it’s so hard to do so was really nice to see.

In the proceedings of the book, Jetta ends up meeting a few people and I personally really liked when she met the other girls in the story, Cheeky for example. The thing I enjoyed the most here was the fact that neither girl were being mean for no reason to each other, they actually tried to help whenever they could and this sort of makeshift friendship that started out of the fact that both haven’t had easy lives, was a breathe of fresh air when compared to the usual “mean girls” atmosphere YA books take. Since it’s a YA, what about the love interest? While there has been some very brief hints dropped into the story, the romance wasn’t important in the slightest nor focused on for more than a couple of pages before something happened and I’m sure (and hope) it’s not going to be revisited in the same way ever again because the story is more than strong enough to stand on its own without that added in.

I’m excited to see where we go from here, not sure how many books will be there, but I hope for at least a trilogy to cover the world Heidi Heilig built in this book. I may not have talked about the plot as much as I should’ve, but with the amount of similar elements in many YA stories, it wasn’t difficult to predict quite a bit of this book’s reveals and see the direction it was going to take so I opted to focus on the things that actually made it stand out to me instead :)

Final rating: 4/5

Was debating on 3.5, but I’ll round it up for this one.

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Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 5 October, 2018: Finished reading
  • 5 October, 2018: Reviewed