'Farris has the misfortune of being an elemental: born human but host to barely contained primal energies. He wants what any young person wants—the chance to live his own life. Yet the fiery forces within him make him a danger to those around him and a target for capture and study by the Science Guild. On the Lone Continent, humans thrive in their cities through the Guild's revolutionary technology while the forests are home to powerful wild magic. Farris must confront his fears—fear of capture, fear of the wild Fey in the woods, and above all, fear of his abilities—if he's to remain free.'
Dreams of Fire is the first novel to be produced by YouTube content creator Nathniel Wayne, also known as Vera Wylde, who runs the Council of Geeks channel. As their channel deals with geek culture such as Doctor Who, the MCU, and She-Ra it was to be expected that their book would be one that would appeal to fans of fantasy and science fiction, and it doesn't disappoint in that regards.
The story follows Farris, a young man on the run who possesses elemental powers, specifically those that relate to fire. Over time the energies inside Farris build and need to be expelled, though this can be dangerous to Farris and those around him. When the book begins he's making his way across The Lone Continent towards the lakeside city of Torvec. Whilst staying in a small outpost for the night, away from the dangers of the surrounding forests, the fires within Farris swell and he accidentally injures another traveller, forcing him to flee into the forest before he can be captured and detained by the guards.
The introduction very much drops readers into the middle of things, and it doesn't spend a huge amount of time setting up the world or the rules before we get tied into the story. This is something that becomes a pattern for the book, and instead of getting encyclopedia entries that explain the history of The Lone Continent, or the rules that govern magic, we learn this through the reactions of the people that inhabit it, and the direction the story takes. For example, there was no warning that the magics within Farris made him a target for fear and hate until we saw people either running from him or trying to hurt him, and we didn't know why the forests were dangerous until we're in them and we were seeing characters dealing with the dangerous beings that lived there. We don't get our hand held, and instead we're trusted to be able to figure out a lot of this and learn it as we go; and it works really well. We're not bogged down by long explanations or boring descriptions, and simply get to enjoy the story instead.
The story itself is an interesting one, and it's one where you think you know the kind of story it's going to tell a few times before your expectations are suddenly altered. The reader is given just enough information to think that it's going to go a certain direction before it shifts and takes you by surprise in delightful ways. More than once I ended up thinking that Farris would stick with certain characters, only for them to go away in different subplots, and I thought the main thrust of the story was going to be something completely different than it was. That all being said, the book isn't really a mystery story, and whilst there are twists and turns in the narrative you're not expected to try and figure out what they're going to be, and you shouldn't feel bad that you didn't see certain things coming.
One of the things I really liked about the book was these little subversion. I loved how the reader is led to believe that Farris is going to recruit a band of reluctant friends around him, other elementals that want nothing to do with each other at first but eventually come to see each other as friends and stick together; except that doesn't really happen and these people have their own stories and their own goals and don't just give that up to follow Farris around. I also liked how the main threat in the book is building in the background the whole time, and whilst it does involve Farris, it's only in a tangential way, and that he's nothing more than a pawn in the plans of the antagonists and not the centre of their goals.
With so many fantasy stories centring the entire plot on their lead, usually a young person who's barely more than an inexperienced child, to see a story where this doesn't happen, where our central character isn't a chose one, isn't going to have to save the day because some powerful villain is targeting them, is a really nice change of pace. There are certain parts of the plot where you could remove Farris altogether and things would still happen, and this makes it feel like a more realised and broader world, one where not everything revolves around one special teen.
Dreams of Fire also features a number of full colour illustrations. It has the fairly standard and expected world map and even a map of the city of Tovec, but it also has a number of illustrations scattered throughout the book, depicting some of the key moments from the story. The copy of the book I received didn't list any artist names for people working on the book other than Nathaniel Wayne, so I don't know who to credit for the work on the book, but they definitely make the project stand out as something a little different. There also seems to be more than one artist working on the book, or at least an artist working with a couple of different styles, as there's a variety to the artwork and how it looks; with some of the images looking like rougher illustrations that you'd expect to find within a fantasy world itself, whilst some of the others are a lot cleaner and bolder.
Overall I really enjoyed reading Dreams of Fire. I liked how it was a relatively small story in what felt like a big world. It focused on a couple of characters and their journeys and managed to avoid some of the expected tropes of the genre. It's the kind of book where you could easily see it being a one-off stand-alone adventure, or the beginning of a series, or even one of many completely different stories set within the same world and setting. I don't know if this is a world that Nathaniel Wayne intends to come back to in the future, but if they do I'd certainly be interested in seeing what they do next.
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