First Published: 1992

Rating: Great

"In front of a fieldstone cottage, on a crisp spring morning, Risse Leyeadote and her leggy, dark-eyed daughter, Faia, hugged each other goodbye."

I've read quite a few of Holly Lisle's wonderful fantasy novels, but it took me a while to get around to her debut novel, Fire in the Mist. Although I like her later works better, this award-winning first novel is still a great story in its own right, and well worth the read.

Faia Rissedote is a bit of an oddity. Not only does she prefer the nomadic life of a shepherd to settling down in her village, but she has wild magic coursing through her veins. Unschooled in how to use this power and unaware even of how great it is, she uses  it for tasks like guiding the sheep out to pasture.

One day, though, while waiting for a fellow shepherd to join her, Faia gets a terrible feeling and races back to her village.  When she arrives, everyone is dead, and to make matters worse, she's attacked by wolves that kill her two dogs and the few sheep who survived the trip back home.

Grief-stricken and alone except for a young boy who also returned to the village too late,  Faia levels her former home with a burst of wild magic. She's soon tracked down by a group of sajes and mages from the city of Ariss who inform her that her little outburst drained the city's magic for days. The mages want to teach her how to control her magic so as to avoid future problems, and  since she has nowhere else to go, Faia unwillingly goes with them to study at the university.

Once there, Faia experiences culture shock and finds herself an outcast among the other students, but there's not really time to deal with those problems given that a couple of students are found ritualistically murdered in the woods near the campus. Instead, she ends up trying to stop a war within the divided city of Ariss and find out what it is that's threatening the university students before it kills anyone else--or her, for that matter.

Fire in the Mist has a lot going for it--interesting characters, for a start. Medwind Song, the barbarian turned professor who feels as outcast as Faia, is especially interesting, but as always, Lisle's characters are all well-constructed and believable. They have hobbies (like trying to magically modify the genomes of horses and cats), beliefs, and concerns that serve to make them well rounded and entertaining--they're never one-dimensional characters with perfect looks, perfect dispositions, and perfect lives.

The story clips along without any dull moments, which is neither wholly good nor wholly bad. At the pace the story runs I couldn't put the book down (or shut it down, I guess, since I was reading the free e-book version), but I'm a fan of breaks in the action every now and again, so it would've been nice to have a breather. That said, the plot was intriguing enough that the rushing pace of the story didn't bother me except as an afterthought when it was over.

One of the things that's made me a fan of Lisle's stories is her attention to detail when it comes to the more fantastic elements of her novels. Although not quite as fleshed out here as it is in Lisle's Secret Texts or World Gates trilogies, the system by which magic works is far better than in stories like, say, Harry Potter, where magic just happens with no explanations and no consequences. The magic in Fire in the Mist has a purpose; there's a rhythm to it, reasons why it happens, and there are repercussions when it's used unwisely.

Fire in the Mist won the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel, and Lisle's work only gets better from here out. If you've never read one of her books, check out this one for free at the Baen Free Library, where you can also download her Sympathy for the Devil.

[Buy Fire in the Mist at Amazon.com] | [Buy Holly Lisle books at BookCloseouts.com]