My Overdue Review of She Marches Through Fire by A.M. Manay

I've been waiting for the third November Snow book to arrive ever since I finished the second one. A.M. Manay knows how to bring a novel to its close in a crashing apocalyptic finish, and She Lights Up The Night left me hungry to find out what happened next.

This book landed at an inconvenient moment for me, when I was overworked and under-rested and certainly didn't have time to go back and re-read the first two. As a result, it took me a bit to get the very large cast of characters straight, and I found myself grateful for the author's inclusion of a dramatis personae list at the book's start. I would highly recommend reading all three books in close proximity so that you can fully appreciate the rich array of individual and familial personalities and histories that the story is built around. But if, like me, you don't have the time to bolster a less-than-photographic memory by re-reading, the cast list will serve in a pinch.

Moreover, November Snow's character provides the ultimate impetus and focus for the entire series, and while she spends the first part of this book recuperating from the devastating climax of the previous novel, for most of She Marches Through Fire, November is in top-notch form, perilously navigating a world of supernatural creatures centuries or millennia older than herself with a mixture of keen intelligence, heart, and sheer, stubborn perseverance.

I won't go much into the plot ... if you're reading this review trying to decide whether to pick up the series, the answer is yes, and you need to immediately go get She Dies At The End. You won't regret it. Meanwhile, if you've read the other two and for some reason are on the fence about getting this one, you also won't regret it. It melds some of the best aspects of the earlier books, providing great payoff for the character arcs of the expansive cast that developed in the second book, but also recapturing some of the tight focus on November's perspective that made the first book so riveting. I had some stumbles at the beginning, reading it while exhausted after too many hours at work, but as the book hit its stride, it did what so many great books do, drawing me into its world so capably that my own would disappear for long stretches and leave me awash in an intensity of thought and emotion.

Finishing it up this evening, I had tears in my eyes. The culmination of the series exquisitely blends pain and hope and determination into a manifesto of true beauty.