Written by: Sarah Rees Brennan
Release Date: April 5, 2016
Pages: 368, Hardcover
Series: Standalone
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Thank you to HMH Kids and Edelweiss for the ARC!
Tell the Wind & Fire is about a young girl called Lucie who lives in a New York very different from the New York we know: the city is torn between two very different kinds of magic, and Lucie’s own family was torn apart years ago by that conflict. Lucie wears magic rings and carries a burden of guilt she can’t share with anyone.
The light in her life is her sweetheart boyfriend Ethan, but it turns out Ethan has a secret too: a soulless doppelganger created by dark magic, who has to conceal the face identical to Ethan’s with a hood fastened by a collar nobody but a Light magician with magical rings can take off… and who introduces himself to both of them by, for reasons nobody can understand, saving Ethan’s life…
In freshman year Modern World, I was assigned a book called A Tale of Two Cities, and it ruined my life. (No, seriously. I remember sitting in the bathtub crying about Sydney Carton.)
Five years later, I picked up a book called Unspoken at the library, mostly because it had a cool cover, and it ruined my life. (I’ve already talked about this multiple times. I love Sarah Rees Brennan, but she makes no secret of how much she enjoys our pain).
Soon after finishing the Lynburn Legacy, I went through Sarah Rees Brennan’s tumblr and found, to my delight, that she was writing a retelling of A Tale of Two Cities, with magic rings and doppelgangers and a heroine with a dark secret. For obvious reasons, I immediately began counting down the days until the book’s release. As it turned out, I didn’t have to count as long as I expected, because I got approved for an ARC on Edelweiss.
Predictably, I loved Tell the Wind and Fire. It didn’t attach itself to my heart quite as much as her other series, which I’m chalking it up to being a standalone, but it still made me laugh and cry so much. The combination of the original story and Sarah Rees Brennan’s characters and world was just perfect–there was enough of the original to make me feel like I was revisiting the story that I love, and enough new stuff for it to feel like its own thing. As always, Sarah Rees Brennan’s greatest strengths are her characters and dialogue–Lucie is up there with Kami Glass and Sin Davies for me, and Carwyn’s snarky comments are just a delight–and then the end of the book happens and he hits me in the feelings.
Which reminds me–I cried harder over the end of this book than I have over almost any other book this year, which is particularly impressive since I pretty much already knew how it was going to end.
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Let’s be honest–anyone who know how much I love Sarah Rees Brennan (a topic I have discussed at length) will probably not be surprised to see that I made this Waiting on Wednesday as soon as the cover was revealed.