So let them burn de Kamilah Cole
Faron Vincent can channel the power of the gods. Five years ago, she used her divine magic to liberate her island from its enemies, the dragon-riding Langley Empire. But now, at seventeen, Faron is all powered up with no wars to fight. She’s a legend to her people and a nuisance to her neighbors.
When she’s forced to attend an international peace summit, Faron expects that she will perform tricks like a trained pet and then go home. She doesn’t expect her older sister, Elara, forming an unprecedented bond with an enemy dragon—or the gods claiming the only way to break that bond is to kill her sister.
As Faron’s desperation to find another solution takes her down a dark path, and Elara discovers the shocking secrets at the heart of the Langley Empire, both must make difficult choices that will shape each other’s lives, as well as the fate of their world.
So let them burn is way too YA for me, I didn't finish it.
That's a shame, the premise of the story is cool, the Jamaïca-inspired island is great, and I was happy to read a book that doesn't happen in Europe, the US, or an imaginary country that looks exactly like every imaginary country written since Tolkien. It's also base on a culture I know next to nothing about, and again, that would have been a change from every european-folklore-inspired story I've read since I was a kid.
The subject of a post-colonial war country that has to rebuild itself once it has won its independence, and which doesn't quite know where it stands because it has been so thoroughly assimilated by the colonial empire, was very promising on paper; the same goes for the heroines' struggle between their duty and their family loyalty, a theme I loved in Mon Territoire.
But here, everything is too childish for my taste. The characters are totally immature, and the story isn't very coherent, to put it politely. Even the promise of dragons and mecha-dragons wasn't enough to motivate me to go any further.