Firelight - Kristen Callihan (Darkest London #1)

Firelight is a book that kept catching my eye as it popped up on various to-read lists.  I like Kristen Callihan's contemporary romance books in her VIP series--both Idol and Managed were very good.  If that caliber of writing with a Victorian-era fantasy setting, I thought we'd be good to go.  And the library even had a copy!

The story here follows Miranda, a young woman who has the ability to start fires, and Benjamin Archer, a lord who has fallen under a curse and never shows his face or other parts of his body, instead going about in a mask and dark clothing.  Several years after an initial encounter in an alley, Archer gets Miranda to marry him through coercion.  Despite this, Miranda decides he's hot and that she loves him immediately, no matter why he's so weird--and despite the fact that he might be, you know, a murderer.

And herein lies the root of our problem.  Callihan's contemporary novels have great chemistry and build in the romance department, and that is entirely absent here.  There is no spark between these characters, despite Miranda being literally able to create fire.  There is no sense of fairy tale whimsy or destined or doomed romance, despite the story drawing heavily on East of the Sun and West of the Moon, my favorite of all fairy tales.  And there is no decent-strength fantasy to propel the story in lieu of these other elements.  There is no apparent reason that Miranda has these abilities.  Archer's curse is a mishmash of religions that don't really seem to click together, and seem to have been compiled merely to seem mystical without any thought as to what might actually be behind them.  And his curse doesn't really make much sense, either...  What information we are provided is dumped into our laps in a monologue by one character literally as Miranda gets ready to walk into the final conflict.

I'm not entirely turned off this series.  I do have faith in Callihan's writing skills, and Miranda's sisters have promise as main characters in other books.  Hopefully this was just a bad start to a series, in which Callihan hadn't really fully thought through what she wanted to put forth, and the other ones will be better.  I'll give it another try, but this one in particular was not a home run for me.

2 stars out of 5.