This review was written for alexan629, and is dedicated to them. Please click the dedication to go check out their work!

Book Title: The Life Of A Firefly

Book Genre: Fantasy/Action/Adventure

Date of Review: March 3, 2016

Chapter(s) Reviewed: Akira, Toren, & Gavril's chapters in Part One (& Alistair & Akira)

Approximate Chapter Length: 500, 1200, & 1300

Content Flags: Mature Rating

Summary (copied from book description)

What would you do if promised power?

If the darkness gave you an offer you couldn't refuse?

In a land so twisted, so torn by war, the darkness is all that is left.

Children are not told fairytales of the good that vanquish evil, instead they learn the ways to crush the light of every last hope it possesses, to drain the world of each and every good deed and virtue.

Amongst the ash of fallen kingdoms and dead queens a spark of light is found, and all seek to destroy it, some wish to claim it's power for themselves and others in the name of the king.

But there can only be one who possesses the light.

She wasn't born a slave.

She wasn't born a knight.

The drunk was born a fool.

The masked was meant to fight.

Four stories.

Four lives.

One fate.

Who will side with darkness?

And who will fight for light?

Review

In a shattered, burning kingdom, four souls reap the darkness they have sown. Akira, the ruthless queen, dies at the hands of revolutionaries as a message to her people. Toren, the thief who imagined she could be a knight, returns to her thieving ways and flees the city a coward. Gavril, the ruined soldier, collapses under the weight of the dying city and the alcohol poisoning his veins. And Alistair, who might have saved the dying light, kills a queen for her crown.

This is the opening of The Life of a Firefly, a teaser of events to come before the story begins some ten years previous.

The Life of a Firefly has proven to be a story difficult to review. I typically set my upper review limit at three chapters, but I had to read more to get a real sense for what's going on in this story and whether it begins to make sense. It does. Mostly.

This is a story with a huge conflict of raw talent and the staggering difficulties of a writer who hasn't found her stride yet. On the one hand, the writing style is largely compelling and the author crafts a number of gorgeous metaphors:

I was royal blood once, born and bred to breed more pure blooded fools, but as the darkness has held my hand for all these years I fear that now my blood runs black. (Part One: Akira)

But now, from my palace suite I am forced to watch my kingdom burn, as the cause I once fought for hangs me from my drapes and condemns me to death as a message to the people. (Part One: Akira)

They are the words spoken to me, the songs sung from the clattering coin in my pocket. (Part One: Toren)

On the other, there are a number of flaws that made it difficult for me to immerse myself in the story. There are errors such as typos and improper use of possessive apostrophes. There is the lack of common dialogue conventions:

"Where is she?", he commands, his voice broken and defeated as he wipes a bloodied hand across his damp brow, a smear of gore spreading over his crystalline skin.

"Gone", I spit, my eyes swollen, my ankle snapped, my body crumpled helplessly, but even the Reaper could not prevent me from scowling at this man as his poisonous words seep into the tainted air, "On your stead, I might add. And what of her? What of ... Akira".

"Dead", he chokes, but I know he does mourn her. (Part One: Gavril)

Excepting Gavril calling another character's name uselessly in the crowd, in the first three chapters there are only five instances of a character speaking, and two of these are essentially an unnamed woman banging on Gavril's door and monologuing at him when he doesn't respond. (It turns out later that the woman is Toren, which is a bit confusing since it means the first four chapters are skipping around in order somewhat, from what I can tell.) There is next to no character interaction until part two, ten years in Akira's past.

These are first person narrators, but their voices in the first four chapters all sound the same. They use the same sort of language and have the same sort of morbid self pity about them. Akira's voice in the first chapter of part two only sounds different in that the self pity isn't there yet.

But the biggest difficulty I have with this story so far is that it is infuriatingly vague. Akira spends her death contemplating the promises 'the darkness' made her. She says she got everything she asked for—a kingdom, wealth, power—to the letter, but she destroyed it. She remembers wondering why the darkness gave it to her, and that his answer was "Love." She reflects on younger years when she fought to destroy an unjust queen only to become one herself. But there are no details here, no specifics, and without anything to ground it, her inner monologue sails past without making any lasting impact beyond the beautiful words she uses to deliver it.

There are a number of instances when characters are mentioned but not named, and it feels intentionally confusing in a way that frustrates me deeply.

Akira's first chapter in part two does a little better at grounding the story, but it is still vague, difficult to pin down. Death is personified as Akira eavesdrops on a pair she dismissively describes as a rat and a weasel. Akira throws some verbal venom at her father's mistress before dismissing her to question the knight she was speaking to, a man Akira has apparently been conducting an affair with to achieve her own ends. But as she asks him vague things about recent murders and a theft, she finds his answers unsatisfactory and decides he has outgrown his usefulness. She kills him, making it look like a struggle of self defense.

Her motives are completely unclear and her line of questioning is frustratingly opaque. In her part one chapter she made mention of riding off to fight injustice as a child, but there is no hint of that here.

There was still a great deal of beauty to the language of the chapter, such as the personification of nature outside echoing Akira's conversation with her father's mistress. But there were also a lot more errors than the first few chapters.

All in all, The Life of a Firefly is frustrating because it is far from reaching the potential promised by an interesting premise and a writing style that is largely beautiful. In many ways it is an inverse to what I have seen more frequently in my reviews. Instead of worldbuilding and description overload, there is a significant dearth. There is a lot happening, but too quickly and without enough grounding to make real sense. I would love to see this work tightened up because it has a lot going for it, things that lead me to believe it could be very good. In its current draft, however, I'm left adrift.