Book Review | A Fire in the Sky

Switching it up once again with a bit of fantasy.

A Fire in the Sky
Sophie Jordan

Dragons are extinct. Witches are outcast. Magic is dying.

But human lust for power is immortal.

Dragon fire no longer blisters the skies over Penterra, but inside the lavish palace, life is still perilous…especially for Tamsyn. Raised in the glittering court alongside the princesses, it’s her duty to be punished for their misdeeds. Treated as part of the royal family but also as the lowliest servant, Tamsyn fits nowhere. Her only friend is Stig, Captain of the Guard…though sometimes she thinks he wants more than friendship.

When Fell, the Beast of the Borderlands, descends on her home, Tamsyn’s world becomes even more dangerous. To save the pampered princesses from a fate worse than death, she is commanded to don a veil and marry the brutal warrior. She agrees to the deception even though it means leaving Stig, and the only life she’s ever known, behind.

The wedding night begins with unexpected passion—and ends in near violence when her trickery is exposed. Rather than start a war, Fell accepts Tamsyn as his bride…but can he accept the dark secrets she harbors—secrets buried so deep even she doesn’t know they exist? For Tamsyn is more than a royal whipping girl, more than the false wife of a man who now sees her as his enemy. And when those secrets emerge, they will ignite a flame bright enough to burn the entire kingdom to the bone.

Magic is not dead…it is only sleeping. And it will take one ordinary girl with an extraordinary destiny to awaken it.

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I have struggled to write this review, I think because it was a book that started on a bit of a bad foot with me and then took me on a bit of a rollercoaster of highs and lows.

The reason I was a bit put off to begin with was our main character Tamsyn is a whipping girl and honestly I was really not sure about that part of the story, I feel like there was maybe a better way to have her in that position and still be a resilient person. It felt a little redundant and for me, this was only confirmed by the fact that the author has pre-empted a reaction to this by justifying it in the acknowledgements.

Whilst that did give me a little more context I still felt like it could have been done differently and had the same effect, rather than it being Tamsyn’s whole personality. It could have made for some interesting dynamics had there been other motivations for her taking on the role that she does other than she’s been training for it her whole life.

The story was also really dragged out, it would get to a point where I was feeling that pull of the storyline and starting to get into the swing of it and then it would be at least three pages of Tamsyn overthinking the same thing again and again. It was as if the story needed to be bulked out but actually if you took a lot of that out then I would’ve been so hooked that I could probably forgive some of the other issues.

There was definitely chemistry between Tamsyn and Fell, it had a kind of enemies-to-lovers vibe going on, but I was hoping for it to be a slow burn and it went from zero to Fell abandoning all reason over her without a chance for them to build on anything. I feel like there could still be potential for them to achieve that in the next book, as they’ll have issues that they need to face together.

I feel like I’ve leaned a little more into the lows in this review but there were some good bits too, there were some glimpses of magic that I found intriguing, and a part of the dragon side of the story that I was interested in finding out more about. There was a lot more action in the second half of the book so the pace picked up and I felt a bit more engrossed in the story.

Despite there being a lot in this story that didn’t quite work for me I would still be keen to read the next book in the series as I feel like it just got to the most interesting part at the end.