The Fires by Sigridur Hagalin Bjornsdottir, Larissa Kyzer (Translator)
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Special thanks to Firefly Books for sending a copy for review.
Summary:
After an eight-hundred-year slumber, the volcanoes in Iceland’s most populated region are showing signs of life. Earthquakes dominate the headlines. Echoes of the devastating eruptions in the past stir unease in the people.
Volcanologist Anna Arnardóttir has spent her entire life studying the volcanic powers under the earth’s crust, but even she cannot fathom the catastrophe at hand.
As a series of eruptions threaten most of Iceland’s population, she’s caught off her rational guard by the most terrible natural disaster of all—love. The world as she knows it is about to fall apart, and so is her heart.
Caught between the safety of a nation and her feelings for her children, her lover, and her past, Anna embarks on a dangerous journey to save the lives of the people she loves—and her soul (Goodreads).
Thoughts:
When I picked this book up, I expected a book centered around how the protagonist had her life turned upside down by a volcanic eruption; it even says “catastrophe” on the back! What happened, instead, was more of a seriously stupid internal conflict between Anna and herself.
This book leans heavily on the idea of love at first sight. For Anna, this meant falling in love with a “scruffy, untamed man” (her words!) who she has only met a couple times. The worst part? She has a husband and two children. This weird romance made me want to throw up. There’s a lot of dialogue about how she’s ruining her picture perfect life for true love, which just seems inexplicable to me. Once I got to this part of the book, I wanted to put it down and never pick it up again.
This is a story about relationships. Anna is not the greatest person. She’s mentally scarred from how her mother raised her, but she continuously lashes out and doesn’t have a proper handle of her own emotions nor how to handle relationships. As the plot goes through her personal conflicts, readers see how scattered she is. She’s a self-pitying character who’s also egotistical, but readers can’t help but empathize with her as her life slowly falls apart at her own hands. I actually really liked this part of the plot aside from her romance with Tomas. It was well-written, and I enjoyed exploring how Anna handled each aspect of her life, but it could’ve been a lot more fast-paced to match up with the description of the book.
The actual volcano science was good, but it had a lot of facts and text that I mostly just skimmed over. If you’re a reader who really likes details, the sheer amount of facts makes this story seem more like non-fiction at times. It was super cool to learn about the background of volcanoes, and I feel like I learned a lot about Iceland; maybe even too much. It wasn’t super interesting because I was expecting more action, which really only happened in the last 40 pages.
The ending was awesome though, and I really loved it. I think it suited Anna’s personality really well. Her actions seem to be done partly out of spite; she chose to stay with her child after knowing her mother wouldn’t have made the same decision. It also showed her ongoing tendency to actively evade the problems in her life, and it felt like a punishment for her actions earlier on in the book.
This wasn’t all that bad; it was just the opposite of what I was expecting. If you like slow reads, you can give this one a try, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re prepared to suffer through chapters of an unrealistically written cheating subplot.
Reviewed by Rachel M.