Cry of the Firebird

 

Cry of the Firebird (Firebird Faerie Tales #1)- Amy Kuivalainen

BHC Press

Release Date: October 14, 2021

Rating:📚📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: A firebird is reborn on the borders of Russia, a gate to a world of monsters and magic is breaking, and only a reluctant, untrained shaman stands in the way of a flood of supernatural darkness...

Anya is still reeling from the death of her grandfather when a strange encounter with the Finnish God of the Dead changes her life forever: Her family has been guarding the gates to the Russian otherworld on their farm for centuries, and she’s the new gatekeeper. Worse, if she doesn’t awaken her magical abilities and assume her new role, the gate will break, unleashing a flood of monsters and dark gods into their world.

As Anya struggles to make sense of her changing world, she can’t deny the strange encounters. She’ll need to accept her fate and work with the legendary firebird if she hopes to survive—and protect humanity.

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Amy Kuivalainen (Magicians of Venice series) proves her world building abilities are as strong as ever with her new series, Firebird Faerie Tales. In this first book we meet Anya, a young woman who has been having a rough time. She's trying to make a go of her grandfather's farm in Russia after his death but her biggest success is in emptying vodka bottles. Then one day Tuoni, the Finnish God of the Dead appears to explain the facts of her life to her: her family has long been gatekeepers between the mortal world and a magical world and if she doesn't wake up and learn how to use her magic and control the family's gate within the next six months it will fall apart and allow all kinds of otherworldly creature free reign in the human world. Although on the bright side, magic users will probably brutally kill her for her magic way before then. Good luck. He also gives Anya a stone that he says has been in her family for centuries and is now hers to care for. Anya would love to pretend this is all a vodka fueled dream except that night the stone breaks and a firebird hatches out of it. Who then turns into a man. And that is the most normal thing Anya experiences for awhile.

Cry of the Firebird throws Anya and the reader into the deep end of a world that mixes "normal" and magic in intriguing blends. Fortunately, you don't need to know anything about Russian or Finnish fairy tales to understand, let alone enjoy, the story. Along the way Anya gathers unlikely friends and allies as she tries to learn enough about her magic to not get herself or anyone else killed and prepare to close her family's gate- especially as it becomes clear that the gate is unravelling faster than Tuoni had first predicted. Like in the Magicians of Venice series, Kuivalainen gathers an ensemble cast with radically different abilities, characters, and reasons for being together that works really well when a description of them suggest they wouldn't. Here the cast is larger and more varied and we get to know more of them right away, romantic (or at least sexual) interests flare faster, and fight scenes are epic. Light and Dark are not quite what you think they are and there is always a price to be paid.

Kuivalainen takes traditional myths and turns them into something uniquely her own in this new and engrossing novel. I already can't wait for book two in the series and am hoping someone will discover how brilliant all her books would be on Netflix.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review