It continually surprises me, actually, how much of a little
fantasy fan I’ve become. I can remember when I was growing up and my Dad used
to read all these sci-fi and fantasy novels and I was all WHY WOULD I WANT TO
READ BOOKS ABOUT DRAGONS AND MAGIC AND PLACES THAT AREN’T REAL AND THINGS THAT
COULD NEVER EXIST and now I am all grabby hands for all of those things.
Anyhow. In that vein, let us talk today about the first in
Sally Green’s new series The Smoke
Thieves.
Sidenote: you may have heard of Sally from her Half Bad trilogy, and if you haven’t,
well, you should get on that. S’good.
So The Smoke Thieves is
new, and it’s about a princess preparing for a political marriage, the guard
she’s in love with, a servant hungry for
revenge, a boy who isn’t sure what he wants to do with his life and steals
things just because he can, and a thirteen year old girl who spends her life
being bait for a demon hunter.
I KNOW, RIGHT? ALL THE GOOD THINGS.
I could not get enough of this book. I loved it.
I mean sure, there’s a lot going on here and there are so many protagonists so I’ll admit I was
a little bit scared it was going to be too
much but actually it totally worked, and I loved them, precious little
flowers that they are.
Princess Catherine for example is EXCELLENT. She’s headstrong
and loyal and opinionated and in this pretty rubbish male-dominated world she
lives in, she’s not afraid to ask questions.
Tash is so precious although she’d kick you in the shins for
saying it; she’s old before her time that kid and you ache for her. She’s also
hilarious.
As for March and Edyon. ALL THE FEELS.
I am ambivalent towards Ambrose, which might be terrible of me
but he was my least fave and I wished Catherine would stop going on so much
about how much she loved him. I WANT DEMON HUNTING AND CUTE BOYS KISSING DAMMIT.
This cliched romance between princess and guard, whilst vital, fell a bit flat.
And actually now I am thinking about it, that is my issue – I like Ambrose and
he has the worst luck so he does not deserve this from me, I just don’t think I
like him with Catherine and so much
of his story was their pining and he
did not have the same amount of excellence as she did and so did not keep me
engaged.
The story switches between each of the five and whilst it
starts off as separate threads you realise pretty quickly that these stories
are going to overlap and I am so here for that you don’t even know. It’s so
clever and well thought out and the world-building here is spot on and we all
know how I live for that. The character voices are all really distinct too so I
never felt like anybody was interchangeable which can defo be thing when you
have so many people telling a story. I
was one hundred percent engaged pretty much the whole time and I ended it
wanting to have a small tantrum because I
want book two right now.
Overall, then, I loved this book, I loved it and I’m super
looking forward to book two for sure and with the exception of Ambrose (sorry
dude) and the fact there was a lot of unnecessary F-bombing - which doesn’t bother
me, I have no problem with swearing but I noticed here which makes me think there
must be a lot and I kind of wondered why – this is a pretty solid start to a
series and a great break away from the supernatural Half Bad. It isn’t perfect
and it’s by no means the best writing ever: it’s flawed and now I’ve sat down to talk
about it, I’m remembering the things that made me sort of grimace a little bit,
like the swearing and the sometimes clunky writing and the fact that some
narratives were more fully fleshed out than others, but wow I was so engaged
and I couldn’t put it down and I just…all faults aside I really really liked it. I
LIKED IT.
And the copy I have is SO PRETTY. The cover is all pastely and it has coloured edges and I swoon.
