3/5, average
I first learned about Hafsah Faizal when a Twitter post of hers responding to someone being rude about her niqab went viral. I saw that and decided “forget that person, I’m going to buy her book.” I’m not really a fan of YA fantasy, but I love the cover and the concept looked interesting: a romance between a huntress and an assassin set in an Arabia-inspired fantasy world.
I had a really hard time getting into this book. The first chapter throws a lot of new words at you, both place names and Arabic words. I think I picked this up once and tried to read it but didn’t have the motivation and put it down. Then we needed a new book for book club and I suggested it, so that gave me the impetus to buckle down and get through it.
The further We Hunt the Flame goes, the better it gets. Like other fantasy books, it takes a while to establish the characters and setting. That slow beginning is rough, but once the action gets going it becomes much more exciting. Hafsah Faizal is particularly good at writing fight scenes that feel visceral and impactful. The short chapters with lots of negative space at the end and beginning of each chapter (at least in the hardcover version) make it feel like you’re making progress and it’s going by faster.
I liked the characters, but they felt a little one-note… Zafira (the main character huntress) is very strong and stoic. She has plenty of emotional moments, but I didn’t notice much that would differentiate her from a similar strong female character. Nasir (the assassin boy) is a little bit more unique and complex. There were some things about his situation that I found a bit farfetched, but I was willing to suspend disbelief because it was interesting.
As for the side characters, Altair seemed like the sassy gay friend type (except not gay? Nasir says he likes women) who added a lot of levity to an otherwise serious story about saving the world from the tyrannical forces of evil. Kifah was cool as a badass warrior woman, though I feel we didn’t get to see much of her. I liked that Yasmine had a crudely humorous side to her instead of simply being a more feminine foil to Zafira’s masculinity.
The setting was really interesting—it centers on a cursed island, surrounded by a cursed sea, enclosed by a cursed forest. On the shores all around that are five caliphates that are controlled by the sultan. Zafira hails from the snowy land of Demenhur, which used to be a desert until something happened that made magic disappear. Each of the caliphates has different strengths, cultures, and exports. In this book, we mostly see Demenhur, Sarasin, and Sultan’s Keep, but the other caliphates will likely be explored in the second book of the duology called We Free the Stars.
The writing was okay but it didn’t wow me. There were a couple sentences sprinkled throughout that sparkled, but overall I really had to push myself to finish reading it and I found myself having to read back a paragraph or two pretty often which is a bad sign. There were a lot of words used strangely, like in the first line: “People lived because she killed. And if that meant braving the Arz where even the sun was afraid to glimpse, then so be it.” The word “glimpse” is awkward there because glimpsing is usually done accidentally and quickly and the sun raises and sets methodically every day, so it’s kind of a hard metaphor to imagine. You’d have to imagine the sun speeding past and then accidentally taking a glimpse at the world, and then that it wouldn’t do that. In this line later on the same page, too: “her toes numbed and the air crippled her nose” the word “crippled” there made me tilt my head to the side trying to imagine it. That word has connotations of something physically bent more so than unobservably disabled. There were a lot of instances that weren’t really wrong but didn’t really feel like the right word.
The plot was also pretty generic once you get down to it. There’s a villain who’s trying to take over the world and the heroes are trying to stop him. It’s kind of post-apocalyptic in that they’re trying to return magic to a world that has become bereft of it. Zafira’s the chosen one with a special ability that means only she can save the world. There’s a magical item that they have to find in order to make the magic return. It’s pretty tropey, which some readers like, but it risks putting more jaded readers to sleep.
It’s interesting that the author chooses to wear a niqab so that she doesn’t have to deal with men looking at her (to paraphrase her Twitter), but the character removes her cloak which made her appear as a man to show that women can be hunters, too. Depending on context, veiling can be either liberation from patriarchy or a symbol of patriarchal oppression. It is also closely tied to culture and religious observance. More broadly, one can cover one’s face for anonymity, hygiene (protecting against covid, performing surgery, anti-particulate), and probably many other reasons.
I can relate to wanting to keep one’s mouth covered… I never know what to do with mine and it usually has an awkward, lopsided expression in pictures. I usually feel more comfortable with my lower face covered since I’m not distracted by constantly trying to make sure my mouth is conveying the “correct” expression (no doubt or fear, open, relaxed, happy but not too unselfconsciously excited). Zafira too has a hard time concealing her emotions and I wonder if that might be part of why she feels more comfortable wearing the cloak (at least at the beginning of the story).
We Hunt the Flame has themes of feminism (men telling women what they are or should be is bad) and female camaraderie (Zafira’s relationships with her sister and her friend enrich the narrative). There are themes of being yourself and standing up to authority. There’s the trope of wanting to escape one’s small hometown, see the world, and find adventure. The most interesting theme is probably the one embedded in Nasir’s story: should one be held accountable for things one was forced to do? That’s a tricky one…
The romance has a little bit of spice… not too much for young readers, but enough to keep it intriguing!
I think young readers will probably get more out of this book than old readers, and fast readers will experience it as more exciting than slow readers. I’m an older, slower reader (it took me about three weeks to read this while it took someone else in my book group one day), so it wasn’t my cup of tea. I’m still little curious to read the next one because I like the characters and I want to see what happens, but I don’t know if I’ll make it enough of a priority to get around to it… perhaps, though!
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