Kindling
Traci Chee
Clarion
Fiction, YA Action/Fantasy
Themes: Country Tales, Cross-Genre, Diversity, Girl Power, Magic Workers, Soldier Stories, Thieves
***+
Description
When nation fought nation on the Kindar peninsula, kindlers were the ultimate weapon: boys and girls with
special gifts focused by balar crystals, unleashing powers to protect or destroy... but at a steep cost. For
to use their magic, kindlers burned up their futures, days or months or years, few surviving past their
teens. Thus, they were found and trained young, sacrificed as heroes in the name of glory - until the arrival
of gunpowder and hand cannons rendered them obsolete almost overnight, followed by the end of the war with
Amerand's victory. The long tradition of kindler warriors was outlawed as "barbaric", and those left alive
were cast aside to wander in a world that no longer wanted or needed them.
In a small backwater near the mountains, a desperate young woman seeks help. Her village of Camas has been
plagued by a pack of bandits who raid the mountain passes and keep her people on the very knife-edge of
starvation with their raids and demands for tribute, to the point where they may not survive the coming
winter on the scraps left behind. All ignore her pleas... all except for a handful of kindlers, all of whom
have fallen on their own hard times, carrying their own scars. Can they remember and honor their old war
codes to defend the helpless, or is the old age of heroes and magic truly gone from the land?
Review
Kindling crosses the brutal reality of child soldiers with the familiar storyline exemplified by
classics such as The Magnificent Seven, where a small band of antiheroes is gathered for one last
shot at redemption (a shot where not everyone is guaranteed survival, let alone success), all told in a
second-person present tense perspective (that's actually a first-person plural, from a sort of collective
ghostly or spiritual host that focuses on each would-be hero in turn). Does it work? In general, yes,
though at some point it started wallowing in its own trauma, gore, and helpless misery (not helped by
rotating audiobook narrators who sometimes lean a little hard into the emotion and gulping, traumatic
hesitations) to the point where it ultimately lost a half-star in the rating.
After a brief overview of the setup and setting, the tale opens with the classic trope of a stranger drifting
into town and a young woman in distress (even though the latter's pleas are initially dismissed by the former,
who doesn't want to get caught up in other people's problems when her own shoulders are nearly broken under
the weight of her own troubles as it is). Not until a second stranger turns up - this one a former war hero
of formidable skill - that the first character gets pulled into the plot/problem, drawn as much by the
magnetism and authority embodied in the legendary "Twin Valley Reaper" as stubborn loyalty to the old kindler
Codes of war that nobody, not even fellow kindlers, seems to remember, let alone honor; the leader of the
mountain raider band is herself a former kindler, choosing to use her training to harass and kill innocent
civilians rather than defend them. Of the seven would-be heroes, six of them cope with post-traumatic stress
in various unhealthy ways, while the seventh is a cadet who was mere weeks from graduating and following her
dream of becoming a true kindler on the battlefield when peace was declared and wrecked her future; this
lattermost character was rather over-the-top in her childish innocence and eagerness to join her elders (in
experience if not quite years; all of the characters are under 20, though war aged them all decades and
kindlers were never expected to live to see their twentieth birthday anyway), actively envying their
clearly broken lives and restless nights full of nightmares and completely ignorant why they'd resist
finishing her training and letting her join them in slaughter even after she finally bloodies her blade and
realizes (or seems to, for about half a minute) that death leaves a mark on the soul. (Why are they holding
out on the big "secret" that binds them all like kin, she whines to them more than once, even as she sees
them struggling...) All of them are looking to redeem themselves or prove something, to the ghosts of their
past if nobody else, by joining the cause to defend Camas... and all fail themselves and their fellows more
than once before finally coming together to show the village, the raiders, and the world that tried to erase
them just what kindlers could do when united in common cause against evil.
You may notice a lack of names in this review; this was an audiobook I listened to, so I didn't catch
spellings, and I'm having one heck of a time finding any but a couple names written down anywhere. They are
distinct characters, and are generally interesting if not always likeable, save when they're repetitiously
wallowing in their own miseries and clinging stubbornly to ideas and attitudes that not only aren't working
but which might get other people killed. I was ready to smack each of them upside the head at least once,
particularly when some terrible thing was happening or mere moments away from happening and they were lost
in bad memories or doom-and-gloom observations instead of, y'know, actually doing something - even the wrong
thing, just something - about the terrible thing. I get that this was part of the point, exemplified by how
the power of kindling is quite literally about children being burned on the pyre of war for the sake of
nations and leaders who not only consider their lives disposable, but who ignore and erase them as soon as
it becomes politically convenient. Even given that, though, Kindling feels like it hammers those
ideas, and the traumas of its characters, past the point of effectiveness, the end of the nail coming out
the far side and catching up the story from telling itself.