A review by rara2018
The Fire Opal Mechanism by Fran Wilde

3.0

I had absolutely despised the first book, but decided to pick this one up anyway, and actually ended up enjoying it. It wasn’t perfect and a lot of my problems from the first book I still found to be an issue here (mainly the utter lack of characters I could actually care about), but the story and overall narrative structure made for a much better experience. As other people have said, this was a Gemworld take on Fahrenheit 451 that brought up a lot of questions on barriers to information, with one hand being total authoritarian control, and the other being controlled by money and education, which I thought was especially poignant given the cost of education today. The story was fun and I thought the transcripts broke it up nicely. This wasn’t exactly a new favorite, but I’m glad I picked it up anyway.