Princess Elisa is a dis­ap­point­ment to her peo­ple. Although she bears the God­stone in her navel, a sign that she has been cho­sen for an act of hero­ism, they see her as lazy and use­less and fat.

On her six­teenth birth­day, she is bartered off in royal mar­riage and shipped away to a king­dom in tur­moil, where her much-older and extremely beau­ti­ful hus­band refuses to acknowl­edge her as his wife. Dev­as­tated, Elisa decides to take charge of her fate and learn what it means to bear the God­stone. As an invad­ing army threat­ens to destroy her new home, and every­one at court maneu­vers to take advan­tage of the young princess, Elisa becomes con­vinced that, not only is her own life in dan­ger, the whole world needs sav­ing. But how can a young girl who has never rid­den horse­back, never played the game of pol­i­tics, and never attained the love of a man save the world? Elisa can’t be sure, but she must try to uncover the Godstone’s secret his­tory before the enemy steals the des­tiny nes­tled in her core.

Fire and Thorns turned out to be an awk­ward book to review. I started of lov­ing it and quickly got sucked into the story, but by the end of the book I have to admit I’d lost a lot of inter­est. I’m aware I’m in the minor­ity, but I was dis­ap­pointed by how lit­tle I was actu­ally invested in the story. 

Elisa, our pro­tag­o­nist, is a princess and bearer of the God­stone. Which means she not only has she got a jewel in her belly­but­ton that runs hot and cold (the thought of which freaked me out), but she has also been cho­sen by God for some spe­cial pur­pose, or pos­si­bly, sac­ri­fice, for her peo­ple. On top of which, a lot of peo­ple either want her dead because of it, want to use her for their own means, or just want to pluck said gem from her body.

Kind of a sucky deal to get when you’re only a few weeks old.

Elisa is a very devout char­ac­ter and also, sadly, a very pas­sive, bland one. To begin with I fully expected to like her. She is over­weight (she tends to eat when things get stress­ful), lacks con­fi­dence in her­self, is shy — all things I, and no doubt many young read­ers, could iden­tify with and that endeared me to her. Unfor­tu­nately, that seemed to be about the sum of her char­ac­ter. Other than gain­ing some con­fi­dence after loos­ing a lot of weight, I didn’t really see any growth in her char­ac­ter and I really strug­gled to find her interesting. I like my hero­ines to have a bit of fire in them and per­son­ally, Elisa just came across as incred­i­bly naive and rather useless.

I do have to praise Car­son for choos­ing to write an over­weight hero­ine and when it is dis­cov­ered early on that Elisa had knowl­edge of war strat­egy, I was excited to read a YA lead­ing female whose worth wasn’t mea­sured by her attrac­tive­ness. I hoped she would become a rather fear­some, intel­li­gent leader and though she does take some steps in this direc­tion, it sadly, never really tran­spires. It’s hard to warm to a char­ac­ter who sits there and stuffs her face with food when­ever any­thing impor­tant is tak­ing place, and even when thin, Elisa is often think­ing about her next meal. I would have liked to have seen her gain con­fi­dence in her­self and her body, as she was, rather than as a result of dras­ti­cally loos­ing weight and feel­ing desir­able for the first time.

Over­all I guess I just wasn’t cap­ti­vated by the story. I found the whole God­stone con­cept… strange, and felt its har­nessed power, once revealed, was a let­down, and wasn’t well explained. There are sev­eral invad­ing forces/armies in Fire and Thorns but other than being (pre­sum­ably) power-hungry, and reli­gious fanat­ics, their rea­sons and moti­va­tions aren’t explored other than super­fi­cially. Elisa muses on more than one occa­sion how she her­self can believe with­out a doubt that she is doing God’s will, when every­one is just as con­vinced of the right­eous­ness of their cause. Car­son never takes this any fur­ther, which I found a shame, given how faith and reli­gion form an inte­gral part of the story. I also found the his­tory of the bear­ers patchy and dif­fi­cult to fol­low. Fire and Thorns does suf­fer from too much telling and not enough show­ing. That Ale­jan­dro is neglect­ful when it comes to his son, inde­ci­sive and has poor lead­er­ship skills is made clear to the reader because Elisa tells us all this, time and time again, rather than let­ting us come to this con­clu­sion ourselves.

There are sev­eral pos­i­tive aspects to Fire and Thorns as well. I felt the romance was well-handled, unpre­dictable and not at all cliché and I liked that Elisa comes to care for sev­eral char­ac­ters in slightly dif­fer­ent ways, it felt refresh­ing and real­is­tic and I’d like to see how they all play out. The story is well-paced and sus­pense­ful, espe­cially the begin­ning and no char­ac­ter is safe. Car­son doesn’t hold back from tak­ing the story where she wants it to at the risk of upset­ting some read­ers (if you’ve already read Fire and Thorns, you’ll know which scene I mean).

Under­neath it all, I think there was a pretty solid fan­tasy adven­ture. What stopped Fire and Thorns from being an enjoy­able read, for me per­son­ally, was the amount of religion. Faith, God and prayer were a sig­nif­i­cant part of the story, under­stand­ably, but it got to the point where I per­son­ally found it over­bear­ing. Elisa was con­stantly pray­ing and talk­ing to God.  She was a very devout char­ac­ter, which is fine, but didn’t work for me and I found I couldn’t con­nect with the any of the char­ac­ters or their cause which ulti­mately meant I didn’t really care what hap­pened either way.

How­ever, reli­gion in books is a very sub­jec­tive and per­sonal thing and I think many peo­ple will love Fire and Thorns. If you love fantasy/adventure books with a slightly dif­fer­ent lead­ing female, I’d urge you to give this a try. While this one won’t be going on my favourite’s shelf, I enjoyed it well enough and I expect I’ll read the next book in the series. I’ll just be bor­row­ing it instead.