#BlogTour #BookReview Wild Fires By Sophie Jai #WildFires

bbookinspector

May 23

Hello, Book Dragons! Today I would like to welcome you all to my stop of the Blog Tour for Wild Fires By Sophie Jai and I would like to share a review, with all of you. Please do show some love to all the wonderful book bloggers on this blog tour by following and sharing their work.

Thank You very much to the publisher –The Borough Press for the review copy.
ISBN13: 978-0008380342
Genre: Women's Literary Fiction
Release date: 12 05 2022
Price*: Kindle £7.99 (GBP)/ Hardback £11.59 (GBP)
Pages: ~ 320
My rating: I liked it, but….
You can get this book here:
Amazon UK
Bookshop.org
What I learned from this book: That every family is complex, some more than others.

Description of the book: The only things Cassandra knows about her family are the stories she's heard in snatches over the years: about the aunt and cousin she never got to meet, about the man from the folded-up photograph in one of her aunt's drawers, and of course about her cousin Chevy, and why he never speaks – but no one utters a word about them any more.

When a call from one of her sisters brings Cassandra news of Chevy's death, she has to return home for the funeral. To Toronto and the big house on Florence Street, where her sisters are hiding more than themselves in their rooms, where the tension brewing between her mother and aunts has been decades in the making, and where sooner or later every secret, unspoken word and painful memory will find its way out into the open.

Moving between Toronto and Trinidad, Wild Fires is a vivid and compelling story exploring the ways we mourn and why we avoid the very things that can save us.

How this book made me feel: Since I saw the cover of this book, I was drawn to it and was really curious to read it. Also, I love exploring new cultures and when I saw that the book moves between Toronto and Trinidad I knew that this book will teach me something new, and I was not wrong.

One thing is for sure, this novel is full of tangles, between people, places and perspectives. Cassandra has to go back home, from London to Toronto, after she is informed that her cousin Chevy has died. From the moment she steps her foot onto her porch I could feel that her family is quite different. They are so cold towards each other, I find that very strange and unusual. The characters are not what you would expect either, they are Indian Trinis, who moved to Canada a very long time ago. So yes, you get a wide variety of cultures in this novel. All of the characters are very complex personalities, and we get to know them quite well in this book. My least favourite character had to be Blues, and the saddest part is, that he is one of million exact same men that roam the streets of this world ruining women's lives. (That's how much I disliked him )

The narrative of this book keeps constantly changing between the present and the past and travelling between Toronto and Trinidad. The past stories were my favourite ones because they allowed me to get to know the characters better, and they were more intriguing than the present ones. The present was very grim, filled with grief and quite repetitive, thus I found it pretty boring. I did not see any big twists or turns in this book and the story kind of plodded along from one chapter to another, telling the story of one big family whose members are very good at hiding their feelings and thoughts. The topics discussed in this book were grief, dysfunctional family, family relationships, secret love, abandonment, useless men, etc.

The writing style of this book was enjoyable and creative. I liked how the events entwined with each other effortlessly. I am wondering, if the author based this book on real events, she was born in Trinidad, splits her time between Canada and London and is a writer, just like Cassandra. The chapters have medium length, there is plenty of Trini accent used in this book and the setting of this book changed constantly, so for me, it was an enjoyable read. I liked the ending of this book as well, I think it rounded up this story nicely.

So, to conclude, I enjoyed this book filled with different cultures, unique characters that seem very realistic, complex and full of history as well as the plot that is constantly moving between times and places. I hope you will give this book a go and will enjoy this strange family's story.

Thank you for your time!

About the author: WILD FIRES is Sophie Jai's debut novel. She was selected as a 2020 Writer-in-Residence and Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford for WILD FIRES, and was longlisted for the 2019 Bridport Prize Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award for a First Novel. Jai was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago. She splits her time between Toronto and London.
Website: https://www.sophiejai.com/ Twitter: @SophieJaiWrites / Instagram: @sophie.jai

*-the price was taken from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com on the current date. The price might change at the time of your purchase. The links used in this post for book purchases are affiliates.

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