Review: Tell the Wind and Fire – Sarah Rees Brennan

*I received a free copy of Tell the Wind and Fire from Clarion Books via Netgalley. This has in no way influenced my voluntary review, which is honest and unbiased *

Tell the Wind and Fire by Sarah Rees Brennan
Published by Clarion Books on 5 April 2016
Genres: Dystopian, Fantasy, Paranormal
Pages: 368
Format: eARC
Source: Netgalley

In a city divided between opulent luxury in the Light and fierce privations in the Dark, a determined young woman survives by guarding her secrets.
Lucie Manette was born in the Dark half of the city, but careful manipulations won her a home in the Light, celebrity status, and a rich, loving boyfriend. Now she just wants to keep her head down, but her boyfriend has a dark secret of his own—one involving an apparent stranger who is destitute and despised.
Lucie alone knows of the deadly connection the young men share, and even as the knowledge leads her to make a grave mistake, she can trust no one with the truth.
Blood and secrets alike spill out when revolution erupts. With both halves of the city burning, and mercy nowhere to be found, can Lucie save either boy—or herself?

Tell the Wind and Fire made me believe in Rees Brennan’s brilliant story-telling once more! A dark world, in which segregation is paramount, but characters who are willing to bend the borders in order to obtain justice.

I loved how Lucie was so strong in many ways, mostly perceptive, too, but that she was still somehow at a loss when it came to some people. Tell the Wind and Fire starts out with a day at a beach, where Ethan and Lucie can sunbathe, spend time together and just be a young couple in love. The day doesn’t end on the same kind of sweet note, though, as the couple misses their train, and have to take on that isn’t only for people from the light city. I loved how Brennan had taken society and made it into something different, where magic was either light or dark, and where the light magic users were the ones with all the power – at least at first glance.

One of the things I enjoyed the most about Tell the Wind and Fire is that Lucie was a strong heroine, but that didn’t mean she spent her time physically fighting, or running all over the world in order to save it. She had an inner strength that I could only admire, and I loved her loyalty, and how fiercely she was willing to protect those she felt worthy of that loyalty. There was her father, of course, whom she had saved from the Dark City, through means of showing herself in a very positive light, the loving, doting Light daughter, showing compassion and strength where others might have been aggressive and rather create an uproar. Little did she know that this image would largely shape how she was seen by everyone once she arrived in the Light city, started school, and tried to live a somewhat normal life.

There is an underlying mystery to most of what is happening in Tell the Wind and Fire, and I enjoyed that as much as I enjoyed the overall story and the main plot. There are many secrets being kept, especially within the light council, who thought they should be able to do whatever it took to keep their own positions – and the Light city – out of the control or the menace of the Dark city and those who lived there. Of course, once people who have been kept down for years can see a bright sliver of hope, there really isn’t much that can stop them, and that’s exactly what happened here. As the story unfolded, Lucie started to feel more like a chess piece than a human being, and she was pretty much spot on.

In the end, both she and other characters had some very hard choices to make, and I have to say not many of those choices seemed very good to me. Manipulation, secrets, lies and outright murder is not something either side was averse to, and Lucie had to live with her own share of mistakes and slip-ups, all the while trying her best to do the right thing – not for either Dark or Light – but for everyone.

Written in first person point of view from Lucie’s perspective, and in past tense, I found it to be fascinating to only know what Lucie knew – or thought she knew – and what she did, as well as why she did things. The writing is really good, and Rees Brennan managed to snatch my attention and keep it throughout the whole story.

When the power of Light and Dark was discovered, the world was transformed. There was no going back: the shine and shadow of magic swallowed the old world up.

We all knew stories, of friends of friends, of relatives, who had suffered at the hands of the guards and their interpretation of the Light laws.

They called me the angel in the park, the angel of my father’s house. They called me the Golden Thread in the Dark.

Reading this book contributed to these challenges:

• 2016 Dystopia Reading Challenge
• 2016 New Release Challenge

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