Review: A Fire Born of Exile

This book is a companion piece to The Red Scholar’s Wake. I kept looking to see if there were any through lines, but the only one that I found was a mention of The Fire Palace near the end of this book. Otherwise, consider it as taking place in the same time area of the Xuya timeline as Red Scholar, but without any intersecting plot lines. This is my second novel-length story by deBodard. Previously I knew her from short stories in the Xuya universe that had appeared in various SFF magazines I’m subscribed to. Over the course of these two novels it has become quite clear that deBodard excels in writing character relationships. The plots exist in each book, but they almost seem to exist as a means throw characters into contact with each other. Perhaps because this was the second Xuya book and I was familiar with the overlays and Mindships being considered children and so on, I found the relationships to work on a much stronger level here than they did in Red Scholar. I enjoyed Red…

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