Beattz
The Night Ends with Fire was a unique take on the Mulan story. Faced with a future married to an abusive merchant, Hai Meilin makes a desperate grasp for freedom, posing as an illegitimate son of her father and enlisting in the army on the eve of war. On her way out the door, her stepmother passes to her a jade necklace that once belonged to her mother, dead now many years after a bout of madness. There's more than meets the eye to this piece of jewelry though, and as secrets begin to be revealed, Meilin worries that she will meet the same fate as her mother in short order.
I wanted to like this book more than I did. It was pretty heavy handed and clunky when it came to the main character's motivations, at the same time, contradicting itself later on. Meilin thirsts for power and recognition and position in the army, challenging herself to rise through the ranks to get to a place of equal footing and acknowledgment, but then when strategy and politics come into play (a natural progression of such a station) she easily and, to me, strangely, says that such things are beyond her and should be left to the men? There's also a bit of a love triangle, and that's not my favorite trope. I like it enough to see how the story is going to continue to play out, at least at this point. It has an interesting magic system, and I hope it goes into more lore in the next volume.
The Night Ends with Fire was a unique take on the Mulan story. Faced with a future married to an abusive merchant, Hai Meilin makes a desperate grasp for freedom, posing as an illegitimate son of her father and enlisting in the army on the eve of war. On her way out the door, her stepmother passes to her a jade necklace that once belonged to her mother, dead now many years after a bout of madness. There's more than meets the eye to this piece of jewelry though, and as secrets begin to be revealed, Meilin worries that she will meet the same fate as her mother in short order.
I wanted to like this book more than I did. It was pretty heavy handed and clunky when it came to the main character's motivations, at the same time, contradicting itself later on. Meilin thirsts for power and recognition and position in the army, challenging herself to rise through the ranks to get to a place of equal footing and acknowledgment, but then when strategy and politics come into play (a natural progression of such a station) she easily and, to me, strangely, says that such things are beyond her and should be left to the men? There's also a bit of a love triangle, and that's not my favorite trope. I like it enough to see how the story is going to continue to play out, at least at this point. It has an interesting magic system, and I hope it goes into more lore in the next volume.