Girl on Fire (not THAT one)! (by Ellen Jensen Abbott)
Excuse me while I go all fan girl. While I absolutely agree with
Amy Nichols when she said that “books are a bit like fingerprints or eye color…two authors may write about the same subject …but write two completely different books,” I really do wish that I’d written Kristin Cashore’s Fire.
Fire was the first
title that came to mind when I heard about this month’s theme so I went back
and re-read it (for about the fourth or fifth time—see what I mean about
fangirl?) to see if I could articulate what I love about this book. There are
lots of things—as a fantasy writer, I love the world, the magic, the
creatures. I like a little romance in my books, and the love interest here hits
all the right notes. The characters are well drawn, complicated,
contradictory—just like characters should be.
But what I think makes me the most fan-girly is the premise.
Plot comes from conflict and conflict comes from the author doing whatever
he/she can to “unsettle, or move or stress or stretch” a character, as Alice
LaPlante says in her book The Making of
Story. In Cashore’s novel, everything the character most wants is prevented
by what the main character is—and this makes for electrifying plot.
You see the main character, Fire, is a human monster. But
what makes her monstrous is her beauty. Right
off, I love the contradiction here. Deep down, don’t we all want to be
beautiful? But for Fire, it is truly a curse. Her beauty is so intense, people either want
to give themselves to her body and soul, or they want to possess her, sometimes
in violent ways. In addition, her beauty opens people’s minds to her and she
can enter their thoughts. She could make anyone be her friend or lover, but
Fire understands that this kind of possession is fundamentally unsatisfying.
All of her relationships become suspect. Does her best friend and lover Archer
love her or her beauty? So her beauty
makes her both extraordinarily powerful and extraordinarily lonely.
The fact of Fire’s monstrous beauty/power drives all the
“stretching” of Fire in the novel. First there’s Fire’s father. Cansrel is the
only other human monster in existence, but he uses his power very differently
than Fire. While Fire only enters others’ minds in self-defense, Cansrel enters
minds to control, hurt, even kill. Fire hates her father’s misuse of power, but
she loves him. And he’s the one being on the planet who understands what it’s
like to have a monstrous beauty. When she realizes that Cansrel is destroying
the kingdom, Fire is faced with a dilemma: she has the power to stop Cansrel,
but to stop him is to lose him and deepen her loneliness.
Fire’s moral code around her power causes further conflict.
As a rebellion in the kingdom builds, she is begged by the royal family to use
her power to save the kingdom. She loves her kingdom and wants to help, but to
do so she will just have to wield her power in the one way she has always
resisted—entering people’s minds and making them expose their inner thoughts.
Should she save her kingdom or stand by her own moral code?
Then there’s the love interest. Prince Brigan’s mind is one
of the few minds strong enough to close Fire out. He seems untouched by her beauty.
Here at last might be someone who will see Fire for who rather than what she
is. But Prince Brigan hates monsters and mistrusts Fire most of all.
I love Fire
because Kristin Cashore created a dynamic, conflicted, empathetic character who
has a problem—she’s too beautiful. From this one fact, the story flows. Hmmm. I think I’ll go read it again.
Ellen, Thanks for reminding me I loved that book. I loved loved loved Graceling too. Kristin Cashore is brilliant.
ReplyDeleteLOVE that definition of plot.
ReplyDeleteLaPlante's book is excellent--worth checking out. I love her chapters on point of view and dialogue, too.
ReplyDelete