Review: The Smoke Thieves

The Smoke Thieves by Sally Green
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's been a couple of years since Sally Green gifted us with a good YA fantasy book - and in that time, I've seen a lot of fellow queer people smash the reputation of Green's first trilogy, especially Half Lost, to smithereens. Me, though, I always did like that book as an #ownvoices bi reader, and I still commend Green to this day for expert-level fanbase trolling. Rick Riordan could never! Lol.

But for this series...not unlike Half Bad, I find that The Smoke Thieves gets off to a bit of a shaky start. Not for exactly the same reasons, though. Here, it's mostly the length that proves pretty daunting - it did take me a while to make my way through this one, certainly longer than average for me. And also the presence of several POVs to raise those inevitable Song of Ice and Fire or Throne of Glass comparisons - some of those POVs being noticeably more highlighted than others, and I feel like my favorite characters are the ones less connected to the overarching plot of in-universe politics and war. I'm especially talking about March (who does feel a little half-baked, I'm sorry to say), Tash (who manages to combine equal parts Arya and Sansa Stark to my eyes), and especially Edyon (thank God we get good gay rep again from Green.) But those politics, to which Catherine and Ambrose are mostly connected, reflect a lot of real-world issues very well. The inevitable dirtiness of nationalism and racism rears its ugly head a lot, and then there's the way people keep stealing and dealing demon smoke - it reads, to me, like fantasy marijuana. Maybe a hint of opium in there too, but I'm gonna go mostly with the weed.

It's a long book, yes, but it all builds up to some pretty nasty cliffhanging of the kind we Sally Green fans have come to expect for the last four years. So for sure, I'll be reading Book 2 whenever it comes out, and hand-selling this one at work as soon as I can.

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