Fire Study

Fire Study
Maria V Snyder

In a Nutshell
Fire Study is the third installment in the Study series, which follows Yelena as she tries to both accept and learn how to use the powers she discovered in Poison Study, and tried to master in Magic Study. The new revelation that she is also a Soulfinder has set the officials of Sitia uneasy—can they trust just one person with so much power?

The book begins with Yelena discovering a previously defeated foe is back and threatening both her homeland, and the precarious truce between Sitia and Ixia. Despite the fact she is wanted dead or alive in Ixia, and is close to reaching the same status in Sitia, Yelena sets off with a few select allies to track down her old enemy, while at the same time finding a bigger, more terrifying set of enemies. As she discovers what it truly means to be a Soulfinder, Yelena must also face the issue of loyalty—can she afford to be betrayed, yet again, by someone she thought trustworthy?

What’s right with it?
In this presumed conclusion, lose ends tie up and all the old favourites from the last two books make an appearance. Ari and Janco return to taunt Yelena with their combination of brute force and badly sung rhymes, and Valek, as always, is the suave assassin that’s harder to pin down than a slug.

The mystery and action is pumped up by volumes from the last two novels, with a new enemy and a new battle practically every chapter. Characters mature, switch loyalties, meet their end, and you’re constantly kept guessing at the story’s final outcome. Yelena herself has grown since her days as a poison taster, although she does frequently reminisce the old days. Although not everything is tied up in a neat bow by the end, we still get a decent enough ending to her story.

What’s wrong with it?
While reading Fire Study, I found it difficult to pinpoint precisely why the story wasn’t working for me. Was it because it just didn’t have the same magic that I loved in Poison Study? The same emotion as Magic Study? Most likely a combination of the two. Even though I’ve been an avid follower of the novels from the very start, I just found Fire Study to be a little flat. Yelena’s reasoning for some things just seemed so beside the point I stopped caring for her after a while, especially in her dealings with Valek. For a man she professes to love so much, she manages to have an easy enough time throwing herself into situations in which she may not live to see him again. A particular moment that annoyed me was towards the end, when she seems to make a resolution to never see him again, and instead devote herself to something else without even letting anyone else in on the secret. It didn’t even seem to be a case of martyrdom, which I could have accepted—and if it was, sorry, I didn’t get the message. In fact, the characters in general seemed to have been bathed in a sea of black and white, instead of the shades of gray we had come to expect from previous novels.

In addition, the book seemed to be just a spectacular case of Same Shit, Different Setting. Sure, it was exciting at first, but once the fight-bad-guys-get-hurt-get-healed-move-on cycle has been repeated almost six or seven times, it loses its touch. To put it simply, I felt there were too many pages devoted to the plot. It could have been made much tighter, battles could have been left out, and unnecessary events could have been skipped altogether.

Last word
The Study series will always remain one of my favourites, however Fire Study was a bit of a disappointment. It wasn’t the plot, it was the execution—too much going on, and yet nothing seemed to ever happen. To give Snyder credit, however, most of the characters—old and new—still retained their lovability, rare moments of humour shone through, and it was still quite an engaging story, despite its faults.

Scale-of-awesomeness
Better than laundry