Some of you may recall Heidi Heilig from her previous duology, TIME TRAVELING PIRATES (also known as The Girl from Everywhere and The Ship Beyond Time), and she has returned with a whole new series that won my heart before I ever began it by including music and script pages and letters as well as the straightforward narrative. For a Muse of Fire is about a girl called Jetta whose family is the most renowned troupe of shadow players in Chakrana. She and her parents hope to use their art to gain passage on a boat to Aquitan, where it is rumored they might find a cure for what Jetta calls her malheur–bipolar disorder. But the very shows they hope to use to reach Aquitan might doom them: Jetta’s secret is that she uses the old ways of magic that the Aquitan colonizers have forbidden.
Here is what For a Muse of Fire does that could have lost me: It takes Jetta to so many different places, and I, as a reader, do not like places. I am bad at envisioning them. Authors have to spend time setting the scene that I tend to prefer they had spent building character. But Heilig makes her places memorable even to me, and she does it by packing them full of emotion. Every new place is desperately, vitally important to the characters, and that makes it matter to even a reader as places-hostile as me.
Another element that I loved is Heilig’s portrayal of mental illness. This is slightly harder for me to pin down, but I’m going to do my best. Jetta and her family are in search of a cure for her malheur, and we get several opportunities to see how it affects Jetta’s life and her decision-making. She’s haunted by her mistakes, and constantly worried about what the next one will be. But what I like is that Jetta and her malheur are not separate creatures. At one point, Leo (owner of a burlesque theater, maybe collaborator with the rebels, estranged brother of royalty) tells her, “Madness doesn’t make you good or evil. Actions do.” And it’s Jetta’s actions that matter in this book. Though we see how her malheur turns the volume up or down on various of her traits in situations, her actions and her mind belong to her. She is not lost to them.
WELL I don’t know if that makes any sense. I have depression, and when it’s not being medicated, it requires more effort from me to act in line with some traits of mine, and less effort from me to act in line with some other traits. But the traits aren’t different; just differently amplified. For a Muse of Fire does a stupendous job of portraying that. (I still do not feel I have described this well, but onward.)
For a Muse of Fire is also postcolonial as hell, which brings me to my last point, i.e., that this is a wonderful adventure and really exhilarating start to a series. In addition to all the places (really! more than one place! that I liked!), it effortlessly juggles political machinations, ever-shifting loyalties, complicated family ties, critiques of governments past and present, and magical secrets that won’t stay secret for long. Nor should I forget to mention how cool Jetta’s power is: She can use her blood to harness spirits and make them do her bidding. It’s the kind of power that could go to anyone’s head (whether they have a malheur or not), and Jetta has only just begun to grapple with that. I can’t wait to see what she does with it in Book 2.