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A review by ielerol
Storm Warning by Mercedes Lackey
3.0
I've read and re-read all my comfort staples too many times over the last four years, I wanted something else unchallenging and familiar but not too familiar. So I thought, I haven't read a Valdemar book in like 15 years, why not revisit what was my favorite Valdemar trilogy back in middle school?
Well, it turns out it's hard for me to separate my feelings about this book from my feelings about the kind of person and reader I was when I first loved it. The prose style is much more utilitarian and, at times, sloppy (awkward repetitions, "from whence", enthusiastic use of italics and exclamation points outside of dialogue just in case you might miss a Very Obvious Point) than I usually have patience for now, and like, it's very white person 90s fantasy! Everyone is lily-ass white aside from the Shin'a'in and Tayledras who were described as "hawk-faced" and "exotic" entirely too many times. All the countries are described as having "a type" except for Valdemar, where I guess the white people come in many different hair colors and heights and chin shapes? Because no one's type includes skin darker than "golden."
And yet, this book, and the whole series, does actually lay out with a lot of sensitivity some very difficult and important emotional situations, and shows people working successfully toward solving their problems and healing from (really awful) trauma. And at age 13 I really needed some stories that would be extremely detailed and explicit about emotions the way these books are. So did I roll my eyes kind of a lot reading this? Yes. Did I also cry when Tremane's "little birds" found some of their marks? I sure did.
Also the Valdemar books were by far the gayest media I was consuming as a kid, and Firesong is the queeniest of queens, which is still pretty great.
Well, it turns out it's hard for me to separate my feelings about this book from my feelings about the kind of person and reader I was when I first loved it. The prose style is much more utilitarian and, at times, sloppy (awkward repetitions, "from whence", enthusiastic use of italics and exclamation points outside of dialogue just in case you might miss a Very Obvious Point) than I usually have patience for now, and like, it's very white person 90s fantasy! Everyone is lily-ass white aside from the Shin'a'in and Tayledras who were described as "hawk-faced" and "exotic" entirely too many times. All the countries are described as having "a type" except for Valdemar, where I guess the white people come in many different hair colors and heights and chin shapes? Because no one's type includes skin darker than "golden."
And yet, this book, and the whole series, does actually lay out with a lot of sensitivity some very difficult and important emotional situations, and shows people working successfully toward solving their problems and healing from (really awful) trauma. And at age 13 I really needed some stories that would be extremely detailed and explicit about emotions the way these books are. So did I roll my eyes kind of a lot reading this? Yes. Did I also cry when Tremane's "little birds" found some of their marks? I sure did.
Also the Valdemar books were by far the gayest media I was consuming as a kid, and Firesong is the queeniest of queens, which is still pretty great.