Wind On Fire

The Wind on Fire Trilogy is one of the best young fantasy series I could recommend.
I'm in the middle of rereading the second book right now and it's a wonderful and strange feeling, to re-experience the actual book and my initial memory/feelings (and subsequent reading/feelings) at the same time.

I think the reason the Harry Potter books were so beloved - not just enjoyed, but loved - was due to the fact that they grew up with us.

This only half means the characters aged as we aged - although that was significant.
I mean the writing style, the seriousness of the plot, the interactions of the characters, the subject matter, all got progressively more....adult, as we did.
I mean, the first one is sort of a "tralala yerawizardEri, ever flavor beans" and the third one is "hey, there are actual dark wizards around" and the fourth one is where things start going "hey, woah, holy shit", and the fifth is "oh my god fuck" and the sixth is "fuckfuckfuck" and the seventh is just a soundless, agape O-shaped mouth.

So that metaphor was stupid.

The Wind on Fire trilogy is a much better and condensed example of works growing up with the readers. It's one of the few book series that I would actually want to space out throughout a young readers life, on a scale of months if not years. (Other series, I hear you asking me to support my argument, include Ursula LeGuinn's Earthsea [from, say, sixth to eighth grade] and honestly maybe even His Dark Materials, just for the emotional content requiring maturity [not, of course, to insinuate with great age comes great maturity. In these examples I am {as I am entitled to do on this blog} assuming the hypothetical person we are discussing is merely a copy of myself.] in order to be fully understood)

Ah, been a while since I let one of those triple-bracketers out. Must be this rereading of old books. I'm a sentimental old man.

Each book is just so different, so changed, so perfect for its specific duty.
The rarity of three separate and specific things working harmonically, carrying a thread of characters and story throughout, just makes you appreciate it all the more each time you change books.

The first one, The Wind Singer, is a fable. Possibly even a fairy tale.
It's a journey story, it's a fantasy novel in which there is set a stage and a cast of characters and we learn about the history and the past and everything is told in simple terms and...has this dreamy quality about it that you just accept. No, not accept as in you acknowledge and read in spite of - I mean it has that matter of fact statement of the incredible style in the manner of American tall tales (i.e. "Well, what I reckon I need is a gun, said Pecos Bill. So he invented himself the six shooter.)
The children go on a journey. There is a goal of salvation, an evil to oppose them, a clear delineation of good and bad, a diverse cast of characters.
Everything is so simple - not stupid, not small, just simple. There is only one of everything. The mountain is The Mountain. The desert is The Desert. People who are good are All Good, and those who are Evil are Pure Evil (and, may I add, downright unsettling).

This is not to say that it is a typical tale, of course. The Wind Singer is lovely and original. It is beautiful and captivating and it ends happily and with closure. This book could exist alone, and ought to for the young child who reads it.


Because Slaves of the Mastery, the second book, tears it all down five years later. With terrible beauty. The City and its People burn to death. Are enslaved. Are marched across the land.

It makes the world so much bigger. There are other, greater evils than The Greatest and Only Evil. There are other cities, other lands, other peoples, and they need slaves. Characters who were toddlers are now fully fledged young identities. The older among them are that much closer to death.
Characters who were teens are now young adults.
And all that that entails.

Slaves of the Mastery is the best of the books, simply because of the level of wonderment that comes from seeing this (beautifully rendered, fully functioning) two dimensional world and its characters suddenly get fleshed into three full dimensions.
New characters who are perfectly shaped to interact with these updated older characters are introduced. Unchanging concepts are, of course, challenged. Changed.
And behind it all, built upon the vague allusions of the first book, the real trilogy-wide storyline begins to take shape. We are given glimpses of the great and terrible future.

It is a time of exciting adolescence, of death and love and fight-dances and dance-fights. People die.
(It is worth noting here that the author of this book has written some other examples of this sort of thing.)


People we cared about die.
And people we hate, with good reason, die!
And some people who don't die, grow up and kill!
Or love.

I read the first Hunger Games book (with no small amount of apprehension, due to everyone reacting exactly the same when I asked them about it), and the whole time I couldn't shake the feeling that I was being instructed to feel strongly about something that didn't quite deserve the amount of emotion it was asking of me. It was a strange feeling, no doubt, but a highly specific one. It was too heavy handed in its emphasis that this was the thing I should be feeling contempt or horror or enthusiasm or hope for, and this was the thing I should be feeling at this time.
Several times I was reminded of a scene that paralleled the Hunger Games in Slaves of the Mastery, that managed to accomplish similar things with less everything and more skill. It spurred me to reread this series.

The best thing is how different it all feels, compared to the first one. Everything is ambiguous, and heroes behave poorly (but not in a heavy handed way, merely in a natural progression of events way) and -even worse- sometimes the evil is calm, compassionate, and rational. Sometimes the evil is beautiful and compelling.

The whole book is beautiful and compelling. But still....young adult, of course. Always with that grain of sand.

I mean salt.



The third one, Firesong, is exactly that.

I have no words for Firesong.

People die. Everyone dies.
Everyone also lives, of course. Because it's that type of book.
There is less time dilation, it pretty much picks up from the end of the second book - but then again, it follows all the way to the end of everyone's lives.
Everyone.
Characters from the second book that were picked up are changed as thoroughly as those from the first book were changed in the beginning of the second.
Everyone is older still.
Good and evil are totally ambiguous, and the style of telling even more so.
Back comes the dreamlike quality, in which our protagonists(?) drift through a world of incredible art and wonder, back comes the travel through a magical land with a cast of strange characters, but along with it comes the sobering reality of the second book.
If book one was the seed, and book two was the tree, book three is the house the tree was built into. And the fire the tree was burned in. And all the influences the tree has had.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to follow multiple lives throughout a trilogy of books of startling literary difference and somehow come out with an ending that is satisfying?
Sure, it's heartbreaking and gorgeous and final, but it's perfect. It fits, god damn it.

I'm so excited to finish the second and read the third book.
I'm so terrified.
Really. I'm apprehensive. I mean, how often do you reread the Amber Spyglass? This is not light reading. There are going to be tribulations. I know what the outcome is going to be, and I am still wary.

Read these fucking books.

(Holy shit man I just watched half of Gladiator again. Oh man.)