Rose Quartz Reads

It's always a risk when one picks up a book on a whim. It's impossible to know what to expect when you've never heard of a book, and there's always the potential of it going disastrously wrong. But Daughter of the Burning City ended up being a pleasant and refreshing surprise that stands out from the YA fantasy crowd.



The story is set in the travelling circus-city of Gomorrah, with a girl who can create powerful illusions as it's protagonist. Sorina lives and performs with the family of illusions she created for herself, all of whom have special abilities. As illusions, they should not be able to die, but when one of them is murdered, Sorina teams up with a boy who cannot be killed in order to track down the culprit and protect the rest of her family.

The murder mystery is by far the most exciting aspect of the novel. The story had me guessing and double guessing at every turn as to who the person targeting the illusions was. What made this even more exciting was that the physical copy of the book has illustrated pages of the characters scattered throughout, with words scrawled like a killer's hitlist. I haven't seen something like this done before, but it really kept up the intensity of the story.

I did struggle for a while in remembering all of Sorina's family members. There are a lot of them, and because the language did more telling than showing I found it hard to form a connection with any of the characters. The flat language was also part of the reason I read it a bit slower than I read typically. I felt like I was being told that Sorina saw Villiam as a father and saw Venera as a sister, but I didn't completely buy that connection, nor did I feel the threat of the potential war or anything beyond the main storyline.