Review: We Set the Dark on Fire

We Set the Dark on Fire by Tehlor Kay Mejia
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It's a strange little novel, this one - strange in that it was one of the most mixed bags I've yet read in a while. Don't get me wrong, Tehlor Kay Mejia makes a very important point in her very important debut, but there are also other stories - YA, fantasy, or otherwise - which make some of those points better, imo. I feel like this book suffers most from underwhelming characters - the fact that it's written entirely in third-person doesn't help, because I've always had trouble getting into third-person POV's heads as opposed to first. But for its limits on the character front, Mejia is pretty gifted at her plotting and messaging - and especially at world-building, in which she creates a unique mythology to underpin this bitterly divided world. It has a lot of shades of the West, especially America, looking down on the global south from behind a curtain of closed borders and sneering privilege. It also draws a lot on images of Latin America's culture of machismo, heightened to the point of high-class men taking two wives - a custom enshrined in tradition dating back thousands of years, to the time of the gods, and those gods were pretty overly macho themselves because they literally split the island up after fighting over a goddess. But you know what? All it'll take is the right person, or people, to figure out how to turn that privilege around and help set things right. And while that doesn't quite happen in this here book...there's at least going to be one more in which it does.

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