Review: We Hunt the Flame by Hafsah Faizal
I took a slightly over nine-month break after I read 48% of this book. But it only took like 30 pages to get back into the story after that break.
I really liked the setup portion of this story. I was really interested in the character relationships that were beautifully built around Zafira. I also was really invested in the corrupt and dangerous world Nasir was entrenched in. So once the two of them met and were given a mission to go to a third location to retrieve a magic item for competing reasons, a lot of the things I was invested in suddenly were not the focal point.
I did find a lot of this book very predictable. So much of this book drew my mind back to other book series (or to Pirates of the Caribbean), not necessarily in a bad way, just in a way that I kind of kept expecting to be subverted but just never really was. But I fully expect it to be subverted in book two.
This book also has so many fight scenes that are very similar to each other, and quite a few of them were one after another without much in the interim. I just didn't like this; the pacing of the fight scenes really should have made me want to keep reading, but it just kind of made me space out. It was basically a race to the end of the book to see if I would be sparked to continue with the series.
I did really enjoy this books ending. I had guessed two of the big plot reveals, but there was a third that I really did like and was surprised by. What really got me at the end of the book was the emotional stakes that suddenly ratcheted up in the last 50 ish pages. I was hooked.
I gave this book 3 stars.
