"Firetale" Finale Review.

 Things begin to happen a little too quickly in the final chapters.  Greg dies, is resurrected by Martha, whose body is killed while her consciousness is in Greg's body, and then we find out she's actually a goddess, all in two short chapters.  Too, too much all at once.  Plus, it is difficult to understand why the Judge would bother killing Martha at all.  She obviously hadn't broken the pactum, and he wasn't even sure she was a demionis.  She hadn't done anything that could have warranted an execution, and yet he killed her when she was defenseless.  Sure, we'd seen enough of Judge Ciaus to know that he was a bastard who would kill indiscriminately, but this still seemed beyond him.

The end is abrupt (a pseudo cliffhanger meant to make you want to read the next book, but doesn't).  Though it sets up the whole goddess story line to be the potential focus for the next book, the fact that we knew nothing about the goddess until the very end of the first book doesn't create a strong emotional connection to that potential plot.  The Astorath story line was completely ignored in the last few chapters, and we don't know where Zaches ran off to.  The story we were following for the first book is left unfinished, and a new one is shoved in its place at the eleventh hour, and it feels wrong.  In fact, the last few chapters of "Firetale" almost feel like they were written by a different person.  The voices of the characters feel different.  The descriptions of events feel like they flow differently.  Maybe this part of the story was written at a different time than much of the opening chapters, but there is definitely a disconnect that is unpleasantly jolting in the final quarter of the book.

We're also still seeing chapters from other points in time that have no relation to the current story.  Maybe they'll come into play in the next few books, or maybe they're not meant to be anything more than mental breaks, or to stretch out the number of pages.  Whatever their intended purpose, they feel unwelcome.

This book had so much promise in the opening chapters.  I was inspired by the number of characters, by how well each voice was written.  Now I'm disappointed.  I think that Dante E. Graves just tried to do too many things in this story and it turned it into a bit of a muddled mess.  Very unfortunate.  I'm not even sure I'll bother with the second book in the series.  I just don't know if I care enough about the characters anymore, and I know that I don't want to suffer through such unnecessary back story and exposition just to finish off the Astorath story line.

An In-Progress review of "Firetale" by Dante E. Graves, down to the home stretch.

I think my reigning theory at this point is that Martha is actually an Angel sent to spy on the circus by God.  I mean, if the Devil can have human spies in churches, why can't God have a spy in the circus?  It would explain why she is able to calm people with simply her presence, and why she has no memory of who she is or how she came to be there.  It might also explain why she was in a town that the circus happened to pass through so soon before they arrived.  God set her up to be picked up by them.  That is my theory anyway.  I keep expecting to find out that God is trying to see if the demionis can be restrained.  It would explain why Martha is most attracted to the most dangerous - he's the one who needs a little god-like intervention.  But if she doesn't know what she is, if she doesn't know what she's capable of, I'm not sure what all she's supposed to be doing there.

We're allowed a glimpse at the human side of Lazarus, but that's about all we've seen in character development in the last couple of chapters.  Everyone is pretty much doing exactly what they're expected to do.  No one's made any major decisions.  Everything's just puttering along.  But we do get to find out that Lazarus fell in love with a human at one time, but decided to keep his distance from her for the sake of the circus.  Ahh, how predictable.

I'm not sure what to expect from the wrap-up for this story.  As it stands, Greg is injured and in need of medical attention while he is alone in the middle of the woods hiding from the Judge who is stalking the circus.  There are plenty of pages left to work it all out, but not quite enough to introduce anything more dire or captivating as far as obstacles for our protagonists to overcome.  I guess I'll just have to wait and see how it all turns out.

In progress review of "Firetale," past the half-way point.

Several new characters have been introduced, and vignettes spanning the more than 100 years of the circus make it a little difficult to remember who is who.  A few questions that were raised in the early part of the book are beginning to be answered, however, so that's nice.  We now understand why it is so important to Lucifer to have the circus as a safe place for his demionis.  During the inquisition, demionis were hunted down to near extinction, and the progeny of psychics were trained as Judges (who are really judge, jury, and executioner) who could track down and kill and demionis that showed itself to be dangerous to humans.

A Judge is now on the trail of Greg, our little firestarter.  The demon Astorath pointed the Judge in the direction of the circus.  Though Astorath was one of the first to follow Lucifer from heaven, he now wants to return to his home and thinks that if he shows God that Lucifer can't control his demon spawn, it will put him back into His good graces.  Of course, all this does is piss off his big brother and get him kicked out of Hell as well.  We now have the question, where does an angel live if it cannot live in Heaven, or in Hell?  The character of Astorath seems so sad and miserable that I can't see him surviving double exile all that well.  He's bound to do something stupid in short order.

A number of circus archivists (humans who travel with the circus, listing the various goings on and studying demionis and magic) have told stories from their times with the circus.  Some of the stories help the reader to understand the purpose of the circus, or to better understand the main characters.  Some of the stories, however, seem out of place in the overall arch of this book.  They're like unnecessary add-ons that should be a compilation of short stories to accompany the main novel.  Interspersed as they are with the main story, I wonder if they are more important to the arch than they appear.  Maybe the various demionis they introduce will come back into play later in the book.  However, at this point, they're more of a distraction than anything else.