Wicked Magic: A Review of "Daughter of the Burning City" by Amanda Foody
I wanted to love this book, I really did. I'm a huge sucker for carnival fiction, like The Night Circus or Caraval. I feel like carnival magic can be so intriguing and weird, and I feel like it can blend so well with a fantasy world.
The good news is, the worldbuilding of Daughter of the Burning City wasn't the problem for me.
Amanda Foody's debut tells the story of Sorina, the adoptive daughter of the proprietor of the Gomorrah Festival. The Festiva l is a traveling, city-sized carnival, nicknamed "the Festival of Burning Desires". There, people can live out their wildest dreams and experience magic beyond their imaginings.
Sorina is an illusion-worker, a rare magic that hasn't been seen in another person in centuries. She runs Gomorrah's Freak Show along with illusions that she has created to be her family. Things start to go bad when someone begins to murder her illusions, something that shouldn't be possible as they don't technically exist. With the help of another unique magician named Luca, Sorina uncovers a plot to start a war that could change her world.
As I said before, my problem wasn't with the worldbuilding. Sorina's world was rich in history and life, each society alive with it's own morals and values. The magic system was in-depth and intriguing, however I feel that some things about it were never hinted at before hand and had to be a Thing because Plot.
Honestly, one of my biggest literary pet peeves is Things Happen Because Plot. not only is it a sloppy writing crutch, but it leads to problems later on with believability. It's a sign of a debut writer. And I feel like Daughter of the Burning City suffers because of it.
Lots of things in this book seem to happen Because Plot. One of those things I feel is the people dying. I know, I know. That is the plot. Don't get me wrong, I'm as much of a fan of a murder mystery as anyone. My thing with this was that people started dying before I had the opportunity to care about them. it made their deaths feel trivial and I couldn't accurately judge Sorina's reaction. Because I didn't know much about the characters who died early on, their deaths didn't really pack the punch I feel the author was going for.
Another thing I want to talk about with this book is how inclusive it is. Fantasy world's are an excellent way to be inclusive, as long as it doesn't fall into the trap of using stereotypes of certain groups as a crutch. I don't feel that this book had an issue with that, however I feel that this book was very white. Most, if not all, of the main characters were white, and a lot of the setting was based on white, christian culture. While I feel it wasn't very racially inclusive, it was more sexually inclusive. Sorina admits to being bisexual, and her male love interest is canonically asexual. A few of the minor characters' sexualities are also given, and they tended to be somewhere on the queer spectrum. I thought that was really great, because we need more queer people in our books.
I also feel like the pacing of this book was a little off. It was slow at the beginning, even as people were being killed, and I had a hard time getting into it. But I powered through and finished. It was a wonderful fantasy world, and a beautiful setting, but I also feel that it had issues that can't be overlooked. So, if you're into carnival fiction, like me, I say give this one a go. It's got a lot of really great potential, and you might be able to find something in it that I didn't necessarily get.
Description from Goodreads:
Sixteen-year-old Sorina has spent most of her life within the smoldering borders of the Gomorrah Festival. Yet even among the many unusual members of the traveling circus-city, Sorina stands apart as the only illusion-worker born in hundreds of years. This rare talent allows her to create illusions that others can see, feel and touch, with personalities all their own. Her creations are her family, and together they make up the cast of the Festival’s Freak Show. But no matter how lifelike they may seem, her illusions are still just that—illusions, and not truly real. Or so she always believed…until one of them is murdered. Desperate to protect her family, Sorina must track down the culprit and determine how they killed a person who doesn’t actually exist. Her search for answers leads her to the self-proclaimed gossip-worker Luca, and their investigation sends them through a haze of political turmoil and forbidden romance, and into the most sinister corners of the Festival. But as the killer continues murdering Sorina’s illusions one by one, she must unravel the horrifying truth before all of her loved ones disappear.
Average Goodreads Rating: 3.85/5 stars
Publication Date: July 25, 2017
Page Count: 384 pages