For a Muse of Fire
Written by Heidi Heilig
Narrated by Emily Woo Zeller
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
A young woman with a dangerous power she barely understands. A smuggler with secrets of his own. A country torn between a merciless colonial army, a terrifying tyrant, and a feared rebel leader.
The first book in a new trilogy from the acclaimed Heidi Heilig blends traditional storytelling with ephemera for a lush, page-turning tale of escape and rebellion. For a Muse of Fire will captivate fans of Sabaa Tahir, Leigh Bardugo, and Renée Ahdieh.
Jetta’s family is famed as the most talented troupe of shadow players in the land. With Jetta behind the scrim, their puppets seem to move without string or stick—a trade secret, they say. In truth, Jetta can see the souls of the recently departed and bind them to the puppets with her blood.
But ever since the colonizing army conquered their country, the old ways are forbidden, so Jetta must never show, never tell. Her skill and fame are her family’s way to earn a spot aboard the royal ship to Aquitan, where shadow plays are the latest rage, and where rumor has it the Mad Emperor has a spring that cures his ills—and could cure Jetta’s, too. Because seeing spirits is not the only thing that plagues her.
But as rebellion seethes and as Jetta meets a young smuggler, she will face truths and decisions that she never imagined—and safety will never seem so far away.
Heidi Heilig creates a vivid, rich world inspired by Asian cultures and French colonialism. Her characters are equally complex and nuanced, including the bipolar heroine. Told from Jetta’s first-person point-of-view, as well as with chapters written as play scripts and ephemera such as telegrams and letters, For a Muse of Fire is an engrossing journey that weaves magic, simmering romance, and the deep bonds of family with the high stakes of epic adventure.Heidi Heilig
Heidi Heilig is the author of The Girl from Everywhere, which was an Indie Next Pick and was also named a Best Book of the Year by NPR; its sequel, The Ship Beyond Time; and the Shadow Players trilogy, For a Muse of Fire, A Kingdom for a Stage, and On This Unworthy Scaffold. Heidi Heilig holds an MFA from New York University in musical theater writing, and she’s written the book and lyrics for several shows. She grew up in Hawaii, where she rode horses and raised peacocks. Her favorite thing, outside of writing, is travel, and she has haggled for rugs in Morocco, hiked the trails of the Ko‘olau Valley, and huddled in a tent in South Africa. Heidi Heilig lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.
More audiobooks from Heidi Heilig
The Girl from Everywhere Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5On This Unworthy Scaffold Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Kingdom for a Stage Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for For a Muse of Fire
33 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Good world building, interesting characters, grim at times and the ending could have set up the next book a bit better. Still a satisfying read and I will go on to book two.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Awesome cover, average story. The book was fun to read, however, due to the use of mixed medium. Narrative chapters were interspersed with posters, telegrams, and other written artifacts, such as sheet music.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'm really into the narrative techniques, setting, and characterizations Heidi Heilig uses in For a Muse of Fire, but the plot didn't really do much for me. I think I would have liked it a lot more in a different place or time, but in October 2018, I was only a mostly-right reader for this book.To talk about the authorial choices - I admire Heilig a lot for what she does here, and find the style of the book to be fun and compelling. It's a mixed POV narrative that takes cues from epistolary novels where each POV uses a different technique. The main narrative is a direct first-person story, a secondary narrative to provide contrast to the first uses stage directions and dialogue, and an explicative narrative to clarify things happening beyong the first-person POV uses letters and telegrams. There's even a repeating element of sheet music and song that felt like yet another narrative or pov, though we only see the sheet music two or three times.Since the main character is a shadow puppetteer and her adventuring partner is the owner/operator of a burlesque theatre, these narrative choices are highly suitable. The contrast of four narrative styles, each with its own role to play in the story, also plays against the colonial themes. The styles with the most depth and force of detail (the sheet music and first-person pov) both stem from the colonized people. Therefore, the person whose parents are both colonized and colonizer is a little more removed - the stage drama - and the coldest and least personable letters come from the colonizers themselves, the ones who are inciting war and riots. It sounds a little trite to describe it this way, but I did appreciate the nuances. The colonizers, the military men, don't really care about the people in the land they wish to own, after all.This is not a nice story. It is about colonization, oppression, and the way a subjugated people react. It's also a story about living with mental illness and what that means in a fantasy world where necromantic magic is a thing that exists - and what happens when someone has the magic to see and manipulate ghosts, and also suffers mental illness, and also lands right in the middle of the guerrilla dispute of her people against the oppressive regime. There are references to death, rape, suicide, murder, depictions of some of the same, and generally anger and ugliness suffuse many of the characters' motivations. It's not for nothing that Heilig insisted on a Content Note in the forematter, which I greatly appreciated. I was able to prepare myself to expect far more graphic and intense scenes than were presented - though they were still unsettling. Some of the descriptions of the main character's manic or depressive moods were uncomfortable in their familiarity.(I have to confess...I don't actually remember any of the character's names, about 2 months after reading. I barely knew the main character's name while I was reading, because of the first-person POV and little need to use names in the dialogue.)The environment in the book is rich and vivid. It's inspired by 19th century southeast Asia, particularly the French colonies, and uses French-inspired or actual French words just as other fantasy stories use their own made-up languages. The history of the colony and magic is complex and felt like it could have been a real thing, or people thought it was real in 1865. I wish I could have been reading a story more suited to my own mood at the time, one with more justice and coziness. There is much violence, but it's a realism sort of thing, the first skirmish in a long war, and the bad guys don't get their comeuppance here.And as a final paragraph, to discuss the plot itself - it is the Girl Knows Injustice, Joins a Rebellion general idea. She meets up with a boy along the way and falls in love (or at least develops a crush), there's a ragged band of rebels, and evildoer ruler and minions. This one is livened by the addition of ghost spirits that the girl puts into her puppets to make them move (a dire secret) and side characters from the burlesque (plus, of course, the gorgeously detailed setting).I like the book okay, really enjoy the authorial choices outside of the plot, and think it's a great addition to bookshelves. But I wasn't the right reader at the time, and I'm not sure if I'll take a chance on the next in the series. (But I might, if only to see how Heilig continues the narrative styles, and if she adds to them.)
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Well paced fantasy in an analog French Indochine of the late 19th century. Jetta is a young shadow puppeteer with extraordinary abilities, that she must hide at all costs, though she must use them in her puppetry to impress the Colonial military leader and the local puppet Boy King to obtain passage to to a miraculous spring that will cure her bipolar disorder. Jetta's high phases are distinguished as being the most danger to her and it proves so, but while this book is not free from many of the usual tropes of young female protagonist fantasy, it is different in it's roots.