We Hunt the Flame
Hafsah Faizal
2/5
Zafira is a hunter who has spent the last few years disguising herself as a man to secure food for her village while maintaining their harsh standards. Nasir is the crown prince, also known as the Prince of Death for the assassinations which he commits at his father's requests. Both learn of an artifact which could secure the future of their nation if placed in the correct hands. Like many YA novels before it, We Hunt the Flame throws these two together and sparks fly on the road to their ultimate destinies despite the countless forces trying to tear them apart.
Listen, it might be on me for reading too many of these in a row recently and over-saturating my own mind. But this just felt like a relatively weak combination of a thousand stories before it. The overarching feel to it felt fragmented, I'm still piecing together what happened and how it all factored into the story but not in a "wow" way more of a "why did we jump around so much" kind of way. It felt like she was picking up tropes then dropping them five seconds later. The conflicts were scattered, the characters were forgettable, and everything just kind of felt faded.
This isn't going to be completely spoiler free from beyond this point but like I definitely won't give away the plot twists. From here on it's really going to be me ranting about the book because I chose it for my book club and have had a lot of time to think about it.
Not to mention that we had a throwaway character less than halfway through the book. To really pile on the cliches of this attempt at enemies-to-lovers, we have the small town boy who she should have loved who we tragically lost too early to really care about. And the (somewhat creepily older) male protagonist also has trust issues because we peppered in the fact that the girl he thought he loved wasn't actually all that into him. Perfect balance and segue into their obvious romance, right? And we weren't even really allowed to figure that out on our own, every single element was spelled out for us and our feelings on the issues were almost dictated to us.
The characters new that the events that had befallen them were tragic. I should have felt bad for them, but they had an easy enough time feeling bad for themselves didn't really feel like they needed my help. There are books that you read for the world and books that you read for the characters, most books kind of run the line between the two in a digestible way. This book tried to give us the diverse and beautiful Arabian setting which it started out in but it fell flat as it wasn't followed through on in the subsequent descriptions. The romance wanted to be a great enemies-to-lovers spectacle but we didn't get the time to develop them as individuals and then we didn't have any deep conversations or interactions which would lead me to really get invested in their arc. I also felt more chemistry between Altain and Nasir or Zafira and Yasmine even than I did with Nasir and Zafira so that's an obvious issue.
Two stars because it definitely had potential in the baseline and it wasn't like horribly boring. I wouldn't really recommend it but I can see where there's some appeal. I know this seems harsh but like I also know some people love and swear by it so there were probably tons of things here that appeal to different readers. I also understand that this is a debut so I think there's a lot of potential for future books if things were fleshed out a little better.
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