I feel like I’ve been in a all out brawl with my Dh my emotions are so battered after it. Amazing, and as soon as I build up my emotinal fortitude, I’ll have to read it again.

I find the worlds Kinsale creates for her characters almost as interesting as the characters themselves. The world of Seize the Fire is very different from the world of The Shadow and the Star, for example.

The world of The Shadow and the Star, while it has its dangers and its cruelties, also has compassionate and caring people, and beautiful settings that act as a kind of balm, both for the characters and for the reader. The title is symbolic, since it is about a book about emereging from the shadows into the light. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why I find that book so enjoyable to reread.

In Seize the Fire, by contrast, the world that surrounds the characters is full of cruel people, war, chaos, fire. There’s very little soothing about it. The most peaceful place, which Olympia tries to recreate for herself at the end of the book, is the island in the Falklands, but even there, the struggle to survive is omnipresent. I think it’s as much a book about how people cope (or fail to cope) with such a world, as it is a romance.

Yes, that’s the way to put it: dry cynical humor. Not joyful, but the kind of dark humor that comes out of a very bleak situation

That gallows humor was quite possibly my favorite aspect of Sheridan’s character. I agree it was quite funny at times, and I don’t want to imagine how much darker the book might have been without it.

From what I read, I gathered Kinsale feels a multi book contract will put too much pressure on her. There’s a bit about how her relationship to writing changed… that it became a chore, a negative.

Personally, I find it puzzling that a bestselling author cannot negotiate this. I would think publishers would want a new Kinsale no matter what.

I think she’s taken her site down at the moment and I don’t want to speculate too much, but I remember that one of the issues she mentioned was that the book she’s finished, The Lucky One, was a lighter work, and publishers were interested in something darker and more like the rest of her body of work. I think that may have been why they wanted a second, darker book before purchasing The Lucky One.

The funny thing about Kinsale, as you know, is how different each of her books is from the others. Although all her heroes (that I have read so far) are angsty and tortured, for example, they are unique. So it makes sense that you might have enjoyed this one less than the others…although I hope you will try it again.

Brie,

Yes, that’s the way to put it: dry cynical humor. Not joyful, but the kind of dark humor that comes out of a very bleak situation.

And no, her books are not easy. I am sure I am not the only one who doesn’t do much in the way of Kinsale rereads.

As for her not writing, I did check out the website. She has written that she wants a one book contract but publishers are insisting on more. From what I read, I gathered Kinsale feels a multi book contract will put too much pressure on her. There’s a bit about how her relationship to writing changed… that it became a chore, a negative.

Personally, I find it puzzling that a bestselling author cannot negotiate this. I would think publishers would want a new Kinsale no matter what.

I really adored this STF. Like a great lover, it touched me in all the right places. I didn’t find the book light, but it had a dry, cynical humor, that could come off as “light” depending on where it showed up.

I really wish that Laura Kinsale was still writing.

Everyone should read this book! And yes, I got preview, and some other stuff, and then messed up a bunch of other stuff. Ugh.

Janine,

You’ve convinced me that Olympia needed more — Olympia WAS still clinging to her idealism, and probably nothing would have shaken it other than a bloodbath in Oriens, because its root was her in large part her faith in shiny happy regime change.

I agree with what you put so beautifully, that this book is about idealism vs. cynicism, trust, and the existential question of the meaning of life when you have to make it for yourself (essence and purpose cannot be provided by god, ethics, or nature, at least not unless you give them authority by choosing to organize your life around them).

Actually, I think thinking about STF in terms of existentialism has unlocked the book for me. So thank you!

This is very Beauvoirian rather than Sartrean in the way the existential crisis is linked so tightly to the question of our human relationships. In that sense, Sherridan is the “sub man” and Olympia is the “serious man”: both are in what existentialists call “bad faith”, rejection of their existential freedom and responsibility, but in very different ways.

From an existential point of view, cynicism and idealism are the same problematic thing.

Oh, look you got preview.

Jessica-

I agree, it is not “light”, but I think I qualified it with “almost” in my review. Maybe I should have said, “comparatively”. Think of Olympia’s wet feathers covering her face, for example, when she is in Sheridan’s doorway. To me that was an almost light moment.

Yes, there was more humor in the first half, but for me the island portion was actually lighter. It was the only part of the story where I wasn’t dreading what was coming, although I did worry that they’d have to get off the island eventually.

I do think Olympia becomes stronger — not strong, but stronger. Think of her decision to go after Sheridan when he steals her jewels. Or her catching the goose on the island. Or her dangling from a rope to rescue their lost knife. Or her kicking that guy off the camel. I don’t think the Olympia who stammered in Sheridan’s drawing room would have been able to do those things.

Yeah, that is a good point. But is the Olympia at the end of the book able to do these things still? I wasn’t sure.

I hate having to use stock romance terms to describe this book because I feel it doesn’t give a sense of how unique it is. I feel very not up to the challenge in reviewing a book like this.

I think you wrote a thoughtful review. It is not always easy to do justice to books in reviews, esp. when one doesn’t want to reveal spoilers.

I guess I feel that Olympia had her trust in her hero and her mentor shattered, survived near starvation and freezing to death on a desert island, shipwrecks, near murder, near slavery, bloody battles, in which she killed a man, you name it. Why did she need more?

Because of the way the character of Olympia is contructed, and because she was still clinging to the illusion that she could be a heroine to her people and bring them democracy in a bloodless way. I feel that in a big way that’s what the theme of the book was, idealism vs. cynicism. It’s a book that points to the dangers of both. Both are destructive.

What Olympia wants to do may be right, but it can get a lot of people killed. And Sheridan knows that, which is why he wants no part of it, and why he leaves right after they make love so that she will marry the other guy.

IMO Olympia is somewhat delusional where heroism is concerned. She wants to be a heroine to her people, and she wants Sheridan to be a hero. She doesn’t understand the ugly side of war until she sees it first hand, because she needs too badly to cling to the belief that she can do something heroic for the people of Oriens. Even after she sees that Sheridan isn’t a hero in the way she imagined him to be, she still needs to believe that she can be a hero herself.

IMO this has something to do with Olympia’s sense of self-worth, and with her loveless upbringing. I think she couldn’t completely accept the reality of being so politically valuable that others would always try to use her (a scenario Kinsale later returned to in For My Lady’s Heart and Shadowheart, but with very different heroines who coped differently).

Olympia could never know if she was loved, or if someone was just using her for another purpose. I think that from childhood, she had to believe in something, in a better world than the one she occupied, so she invented dreams and illusions for herself, of a world where she could be a hero to her people and find some heroic man… a world that was free of these mixed motives, a better place.

But the world Kinsale constructed in Seize the Fire wasn’t a fairy tale of a better place. It was a place where it was very hard to survive, a place filled with chaos and violence and betrayals. Sheridan knows that, and Olympia could know it too, but she doesn’t want to believe the evidence that points in that direction. She wants to believe in something better, so she clings to her illusions willfully.

I feel that it had to take something as horrible as what happened in Oriens — she had to see her lifelong dream come to pass in a way that she never would have imagined for herself — for her to let go of those illusions.

Also, I feel that a lot of the conflict between her and Sheridan was around her princess status. I agree with Robin that it was the reason he saw her as he did and treated her as he did, and I think Sheridan had enough experience of the world to know they couldn’t be together in any kind of permanent way while she was still a princess. He wanted a little bit of peace in his life, and if he had married this girl whom everybody wanted to use as a political pawn, his life would have been full of potentially lethal intrigue.

Here’s something I wrote about STF once, in another discussion.

I found SEIZE THE FIRE to be about idealism and cynicism, and about the nature of the world, is it a good place, or a cruel one? A fairy tale or a horror show? Is it a place that makes sense, orderly, or is it chaotic and filled with senseless violence?

STF seems somewhat existentialist to me, perhaps even concerned with
the basic question of whether life is worth living, whether it is
worth it to invest emotionally in others.

On some level, many of Kinsale’s books are about this — can another
person be trusted? Is it worth it to take a chance on love? But
usually, it is clear to the reader that it is and the characters
simply don’t know it. Or that, maybe in something like FMLH, you
cannot always have the one you love, but you still are better for
loving them, and for putting them ahead of yourself.

In STF, she goes to a darker place, are you even better for believing
in someone, or does it just open you to more pain? Are they the hero
you want them to be, are you the hero you want to be for them, or are
you just as lost and confused as they are, and then, is it better to
be lost and confused together, or is that just a source of more
heartaches?

I think she does answer the question that, we need to love and trust
to survive. But, she also says, you have to trust and love in this
very fragile thing, this very flawed person, someone who is not a
hero. Someone who may be powerless or may be wounded. You have to
see them for that and still love them, not in a fairy tale, but in
the real world, a place where your good intentions can have harmful
consequences.

I really don’t feel that these themes could have been so fully explored had Olympia been something other than a princess, had what happened in Oriens not happened, and had the ending been different than it was.

As for the tone of the first part of the novel, IMO it’s got this dark humor, a strange slapstick in the feathers and in, for example, the booby trapped house. So while it’s not necessarily “lighter,” I can see how Jessica would see it that way, even though I agree with Janine that it’s not a light book in any way (despite a few lighter moments here and there).

But I feel that at the end of the book Olympia is broken, as broken as Sheridan is, which is where she would have ended up with or without him, and where he needed her to end up in order to be able to open up to her as he does. Before that, she is not that trustworthy — her idealism is dangerous.

This point makes me think of Kinsale’s dedication to the Vietnam vets, because in a sense America lost its innocence during the Vietnam War, too, although we weren’t completely broken by it (in many ways that shock really catalyzed a lot of social progress), and perhaps our idealism wasn’t a bad thing, per se, but certainly our national arrogance took a beating, and perhaps that was good and necessary, too. Maybe that’s why I think Olympia and Sheridan will make it, that their innate resilience will allow hope to grow and healing to occur.