Shannon Costello

I have finished my first attempt at a novel and am thinking about my second.  That made it more interesting to read a second novel by a real writer. 

I think what I loved best about this book was the way the author used her writing (including some gorgeous poetic phrases) to write things that spoke to my own experience.  During her period the main character feels “an unhappy captive in her own body”.  I feel such a sense of relief when women write openly about the yucky side of femaleness (guess I’m not quite ready to do so myself, though!).  My favorite passage deals with the protagonists’ pain knowing that she will never have children:

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“ ‘…Ah, Lady.  It’s a mean time to be welcoming babies to the world.’

Babies, Fire thought to herself.  Babies to the world.  She sent it out into the air: Welcome to you, babies. And found, with great frustration, that she was crying.  It seemed a symptom of her friends’ pregnancies that Fire should not be able to stop crying.”

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Yeah…I like that. I think it made me cry both times I read the book.

I re-read it because I liked it and because I was fascinated with trying to work out the moral code of the book when it came to sex.  I thought it significant (in a ‘this-must-be-important-to-the-author’ way) that both novels deal with the issue of sex outside of marriage.  Of the six or seven main characters of Fire’s generation, five are illegitimate.  Four have illegitimate children of their own by the story’s end.  How about this:  “Clara teased Brigan that on the one hand, he was no technical relation to her at all, but that on the other, he was doubly the uncle of her son, for, in the loosest sense, Clara was  Brigan’s sister and the baby’s father had been Brigan’s brother.”

Fire recognizes throughout the book how various characters have hurt others by their actions in this area.  Archer unrepentantly breaks multiple hearts and angers his friends and hosts.  His father’s (er, sort of) act of adultery with the king’s wife brought terrible trouble down on his own (innocent) wife.  If I had to guess, I would say the author thinks that sex between two consenting persons is acceptable if neither is committed to another or taking advantage of the other.  But then, Archer and Fire were both consenting, neither was really taking advantage of the other, and Fire felt she needed it.

Fire later realizes that it is “a very hard thing to have crushed the heart, and the hopes, of a friend.”  I find myself wanting to conclude that this book does a great job of showing the evils of sex outside of marriage…