REVIEW: WE HUNT THE FLAME (Hafsah Faizal)

Hey girl, are you any of the dates I've been on in the past couple of years? Because you really got my hopes up and then let me down tremendously.

Let me be clear — I've been following the release of We Hunt the Flame for months. I was so utterly excited for this release that despite having more books and less money than you can imagine, I ran out and bought this thing first thing in the morning the day of its release. And it's all downhill from there, baby.

If you don't like spoilers, sorry — this is gonna be riddled with them (both because I can't be bothered to hide them and because I don't encourage reading this book anyway).

If you've been following my reviews for any amount of time (i'm talking to myself here), you'll know that Romanov and Wicked Saints were spectacular failures for me in the category of 2019 YA releases. In the spirit of not being mean, I rounded those books up to two stars, so I feel it's only right to do the same for We Hunt the Flame, which joins the pantheon of lazy YA that I guess sounds pretty good when you pitch it on premise alone and leave out absolutely any actual details from the story. Come one, come all to a land of incredibly boring, two-dimensional characters, utterly flat dialogue, try-hard prose, and no substantial plot. If I had to pitch Hafsah Faizal's We Hunt the Flame to you, I guess I would say:

In the kingdom of Arawiya, there used to be magic or something. Then there was a bad guy, and magic went bye-bye because these six badass sisters needed to poof him away. Flash-forward and we follow Zafira, a girl who dresses as a dude while braving the Arz, a weird forest that's basically like the sensory deprivation tank from Stranger Things. Zafira's the only person who can enter it without dying or going mad, so she hunts there to provide food for her people. Except (for some reason), she can't say she's a girl, because her region inexplicably hates women more than their neighbours and would... I mean, I don't really know what they would do if they found out. But moving on. Then there's Nasir, who never moved past his emo phase. He's the crown prince of Arawiya, but his dad is a Super Bad Guy and makes him kill people, and he gets the sick xbox screen name Prince_of_Death as a result. Some way or another, they both end up having to brave the Arz for like five minutes (but not really) to get to this island (???) to retrieve a book that will bring magic back to the land. They meet a ragtag group of pals, and that's your story.

Now that we're all caught up to speed...

We Hunt the Flame was marketed as as rich, beautiful Arabian fantasy from a new Muslim-American writer. I was pumped as hell, because fantasy isn't exactly the most diverse genre (author-wise or plot-wise). I was ready for detailed, rich settings and lore that isn't just recycled air. Yet this book ended up being the most bland release of the year. And not just bland, but bad.

I don't even know where to start with this, so let's go in a list:

THE PLOT

On paper, the plot was fair enough. I won't fault a book for not being "original" (since basically nothing is), but I'm of the belief that there should be a reason you are telling this now. At the beginning of this book, I felt I could see a semblance of what Faizal was trying to do — lay a groundwork where women basically save the world from immense evil only to have it thrown in their faces later. Thematically, I get it. But the world-building was too poor to support this in any substantial way beyond Zafira just tellingus that like one dude has a problem with women. Every other man we come across is totally chill and proto-feminist, so it really doesn't hold water.

This sh*t read like The Cursed Child. It was so utterly cookie-cutter but with the most absurd and poorly executed "twists" and details that were just straight up forgotten about. Here, we'll give Nasir a love interest very early on that could have actually been very interesting, only to have her be a "traitor" to him shortly thereafter (which, like, Nasir... she was your servant... I don't know if you can feel that hurt over her trading a little information about you considering you got her goddamn tongue cut out of her throat). Oh! The Silver Witch is one of the Sisters of Old! Oh sh*t! She's also Nasir's mom! Oh sh*t, she's also Altair's mom! This is what we in the industry like to call "overkill." And it's gonna come up a lot today.

The characters almost never have to do any real work to figure things out. Everything literally falls into their laps. Characters just exist to tell our protagonists what's going on and completely fill in any and all missing information, because god forbid we have to figure anything out by ourselves. It's painful and had me sighing in frustration, but most of all, it assumes stupidity in the reader. Trust us to pick up what you're throwing down (we'll get more into that later).

THE PACING

The beginning of We Hunt the Flame is actually okay. I almost thought this was going to be a four-star read, but alas. We begin with a hunt, a wedding, and soon the Call to Action. Cool. Except that as soon as the action begins, it goes to complete sh*t. Problems move themselves to accommodate the hero's journey. Suddenly Deen dies. Zafira's over it basically instantly, but randomly decides to brood like sometimes. We meet our ragtag group of pals on a dark and ancient island. They all trust each other immediately, even though they say they don't. Haha, funny jokes, cue camaraderie. But nothing happens. Yes, there are the expected random attacks, yes they're kind of looking for aforementioned magical book, but they don't really do a damn thing. They're basically just magical-camping. The whole middle of the book is a broken bicycle chain — the peddles are moving real fast but the bike isn't moving anywhere. And then the end just happens in like... ten minutes. Maybe. They just very conveniently guess at the most absurd possible conclusion and happen to be right. I have a sticky-note currently tabbed on page 448 that reads "How the f*ck did you arrive at this conclusion???" and I stand by it.

Oh yeah. And then they forget a whole goddamn character on the island. Fake-ass friends.

THE CHARACTERS *Breathes in* BOOOOOOOOOY———

This is some of the laziest character writing I've seen all year. I seriously can't remember the last book I read that had characters with less dimension than these. Zafira, Nasir, and Altair are absolute bare-minimum, but Kifah and Benyamin could have literally been cut from the story with next to no consequences (aside from their sole purpose in being vessels of exposition). I didn't feel a goddamn thing when Beyamin died because he wasn't a character — he was a Wikipedia article.

THE RELATIONSHIPS

Too fast, too furious. None of the characters were well-drawn enough to be believably enticing to anyone else in the world. The only relationship that sparked any amount of feeling in me was between Zafira and Yasmine, which doesn't bode well because when Zafira and Nasir hooked up, all I could think was, "You had way more chemistry with your 'friend' but go off." I seriously, seriously expected Faizal to give us some sweet wlw drama, but I should have come prepared for that disappointment. A good hate-to-love relationship could have saved that if there was absolutely any amount of chemistry or believability to Zafira and Nasir at all, but there wasn't.

THE WRITING

I just want to know what manuscript Faizal's editor was reading while this book was in it's revision stages, because it sure as hell wasn't We Hunt the Flame. I utterly refuse to believe an editor let this prose happen. Here's a good one:

"In this moment, we are two souls, marooned. That was life, wasn't it? A collection of moments, a menagerie of people. Everyone stranded everywhere, always."

Ten bucks to whoever can tell me what the f*ck that means. And no, the context doesn't help.

How about this one:

"...her hair a familiar shade of gold, so dark it bordered black."

That's... that's brown. Dark brown, sis.

OR! How about one of the seven instances of this tomfoolery that I legitimately thought was a typesetting error the first time I saw it:

"She fell to her knees."

Wild.

Yes, at times, the prose can be pretty, but it's pure sugar — no nutritional value. It functionally serves little purpose. In fact, while reading, I often eliminated entire phrases altogether and came away with a far more impactful effect. Faizal attempts to employ purple prose as a way to add depth, but it ends up making the writing suffer greatly and losing the point, if there was ever a point at all. Because I'm here with examples, here's another:

"They trekked and tracked for five whole days (...). No, not tracking. Zafira was no tracker; she was a hunter. She hunted. But hunters tracked, and trackers hunted, didn't they? Where are you going with this?"

Yes, Zafira, where are you going with this?

There's beauty in simplicty. Or as Hafsah Faizal would say: "There is an immense, ethereal sense of longing hidden beneath the laced leafwork stripped from its oppulence." (Okay, I made that up. But am I really off-base?)

Now let's talk about the language itself. I am so here for mixing foreign vocabulary in with English prose (whether that vocabulary is from a real language or fantasy). It was one of the best parts of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Waoand contributed fantastically to the world of Six of Crows. Done right, it adds flavour and detail to the story you're setting up.

We Hunt the Flame does not do it well.

As children, we learn language through context clues. We don't always grab a dictionary and commit the meaning to memory — rather, we hear people use a word once, twice, three times, and then we figure out what it means.

In this book, the entire narrative grinds to a halt so the characters can have a weird discussion about what a word means when they should already know it (all for the benefit of the reader, who apparently can't figure things out). And this happens repeatedly, ad nauseam.

"'Sabar, sabar,' he soothed, asking for patience."

...reads a whole lot like...

"'Patience, patience,' he soothed, asking for patience."

Additionally, the dialogue tries way too hard to be witty and hilarious, and it just isn't. There's no chemistry between the characters to have me laughing along, and the quips just aren't funny or clever to be worth a chuckle on their merit alone. The dialogue has its own built-in laugh track, giving us a dead pause after every "witty" line from Altair to remind us its time to laugh, since again, we can't come to that conclusion on our own (except that this time, we really can't).

OVERALL THOUGHTS

Y'all. How disappointing. I realize I sound really mean in this review, but I've had a bad reading year.

We Hunt the Flame had a really great marketing team who knew what sounded attractive to its target audience, but it ultimately fell entirely too short of its promises. You can give me a good premise, but when it's paired with lacklustre plot, two-dimensional characters, and cringey writing...

(Originally posted on Goodreads: May 26, 2019)