"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," 1st quater report.

I have reached 26% completion, so I thought now would be a good time to update my reaction to this tale.  We have gotten a fair amount of backstory in the last few chapters, as well as being introduced to a few new voices.  Zinno, the dwarf with the mysterious face, seems to be a character worth noting.  I find this slightly ironic as he's described as having a face that's impossible to remember.  But he is used by Lazarus to keep tabs on Greg, and we're starting to understand why Lazarus is so concerned with Greg's actions outside of the circus.


The circus, it turns out, has a patron - the one who set up Lazarus in this business shortly after the Civil War.  That patron is non other than Lucifer himself.  His reasons for wanting to create the circus, he says, are to gather up all the part-demon children that remain in the world and keep them safe.  Lucifer, or Louie Louis as he introduces himself, seems like a concerned grandfather, just looking after his flock.  But taking Lucifer's story at face value seems like a poor decision.  As Lazarus says, even before realizing who Mr. Louis really is, "to believe means to trust, and I never trusted the Devil."


Lazarus takes quickly to his task of collecting the demon spawn, known as demionis, as he seems fond of the idea that he has a purpose in his life.  He has quickly accepted the fact that his immortal and can never be killed or die of old age, and he seems to appreciate that there is an important task he'll be able to do with his time that not just anyone will be able to do.  He is special, even if only to the Devil.  Thus, Greg's threat to the circus seems to carry more consequences than Greg is yet aware of, leaving room for an interesting confrontation, especially if the Devil decides to weigh in on the outcome.