With Fire in Their Blood by Kat Delacorte – Book Review

 

 

Today, I'm featuring a book review for a different kind of read. This post is part of a blog tour but that did not affect my review in any way!

“Trust is an illusion in this city. Our hatreds run too deep.”

 

With Fire in Their Blood by Kat Delacorte is a modern young adult fantasy set in a medieval Italian town. It’s got magic, very strange relationships, political intrigue, and tons of twists and turns.

The book opens with Lilly, who lives with her father after her mother killed herself a few years before. From the first page, we see Lilly refer to her parents by their first names, Jack and Carly, not mum and dad. It shows the clear distance that has built up between them over the years.

Lilly tells the reader how her relationship with her mother was never a good one and how she felt like her mother didn’t want her. She also says her father was a different man before Carly’s death him hard.

With Fire in Their Blood is narrated in Lilly’s first-person perspective so we see everything through her eyes. There are no other narrators in the book. Despite that, the reader can clearly see Lilly’s misgivings and naivety even if she can’t.

“The more I thought about this city, the more unsettling it became.”

Now Jack is more of a zombie, who decides to take Lilly to a distant off-the-beaten track town in Italy called Castello, claiming a new start.

But Castello…Castello is literally a beast of a town. Medieval looking. It catches your breath the moment you lay eyes on it. But then… you discover that it’s not what it seems.

Castello is a town that has been ravaged by warring clans for centuries. Now a man – only referred to as The General – controls the city and has divided the clans, the Marconis and the Paradisos.

Lilly finds herself on the Marconi side, which is like the poor side of the city. Mingling with the Paradisos is forbidden except for one day of the year.

This distinguishing reminded of Utopia, a dark post-apocalyptic Arabic novel by renowned Egyptian author Ahmed Khalid Tawfik. While the books’ premises and settings are worlds apart, the idea of a country (or town) divided into poor and rich is the common factor.

In Castello, the Saints are evil. Bad people with magical abilities. But reportedly all dead.

When I picked up With Fire in Their Blood, I wasn’t sure what to expect. What I was definitely not prepared for was the political intrigue Kat Delacorte had penned in this book. If there’s anything I loved above all else in this book, it’s the political intrigue.

It’s relatable (no I won’t elaborate) and done really well. It reminded me of the tactics used by the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. While the stories are entirely different, the methodology is the same. (If you haven’t read Animal Farm, then go pick it up now!)

Like many army-led political regimes, we see how The General has ingrained certain beliefs in people’s heads. Slowly, Lilly learns who the Saints were and what they did. How the last war started and how The General came to power.

“The Saints were the children of hell. Born blighted and unnatural with fire in their blood. Stained dark by sorcery and loathsome in the eyes of the light.”

And like any army-backed regime, The General emerged with his Enforcers who ensure that there are no Saints and that no one breaks The General’s law.

Though With Fire in Their Blood wins in imagery, foreshadowing, and political intrigue, it isn’t successful with characterization. I honestly couldn’t like Lilly. I tried but I couldn’t.

While there are many characters in With Fire in Their Blood but there aren’t any likable ones. And that put me off a bit. I didn’t hate Lilly but I didn’t like her either.

“The girl staring back at me was pale and shadowed, her dark hair a tangling mess. Something feral about her, difficult to tame. I was glad of that, because it hid how brittle I felt on the inside. Like there was another girl, a scared, lost one, locked below my ribcage, threatening to claw her way to the surface if I didn’t watch out.”

What I did like is that Delacorte created a truly broken main character. As a reader, I don’t see that often in books.

But Lilly isn’t the only broken character. Like the town of Castello, everyone is broken – in a way. I think this brokenness – along with Castello’s regime – has made the characters too shallow.

Another thing I disliked about Lilly is how she literally falls for half of the characters in the book! It was annoying. While I realize she’s 16 and discovering herself and sexuality, I felt it was too much. If it breathes, she’ll fall in love with him/her/it. For me it was forced. Kind of like when Netflix wants to force down certain ideas in its productions.

Another thing that stood out for me – not in a good way – was that some scenes weren’t logical to me. The trial was one of them.

On another note, something I hadn’t realized it before, but while writing this review, I noticed that Delacorte added lots of imagery and foreshadowing in the early chapters. Foreshadowing always gets extra points from me.

“After the dreams, I’d feel jittery and unsettled all day, my skin hot, my headache building behind my temples. It was as if there was a storm brewing inside me – like my body was rebelling against the town.”

I must say I found the book cover quite pretty and dark at the same time.

Overall, I found With Fire in Their Blood by Kat Delacorte an interesting and fairly fast-paced read with interesting political intrigue and imagery. The characters needed more work but it was a good read.

 

Overall rating for With Fire in Their Blood by Kat Delacorte: 3.5 stars

 

Note: I received a free copy of With Fire in Their Blood by Kat Delacorte as part of The Write Reads blog tour.

More images to come here and on Instagram