Incendiary (Hollow Crown)

Product Information

With these two words, Chris Cleave kicks off his powerful novel Incendiary, and you know it's not going to be something you've seen before. Incendiary 's claim on the imagination, its literary power, if it can be said to have any, is its narrator's voice. I love the fact that you did not give the main character a name, but am having a hard time understanding the overall structure of dividing the book into seasons.

a bit naive, to be sure, but it was the only ‘reason’ that I could attribute to my creative abilities. Right at page 316, I was kind of losing my shit as I finally started to get where this book was going. With the ferocity of series like Ember in the Ashes and Throne of Glass and loosely based on 15th century Spain, INCENDIARY explores the double-edged sword of memory and the triumph of hope in the midst of fear and oppression. Quickly, we change routes and enter the lion's mouth itself after major happenings in the first 1/4 of the book. The Osama-premise is, ultimately, just confusing -- not so much regarding the question of whether she actually means to post it to Osama (though one wonders), but her purpose and her motivation: by the end Osama seems among the least of her problems, and only indirectly to blame for the ugly world she inhabits.Even the villains were multi-faceted characters who were nuanced and although not exactly sympathetic to them, I could understand some of their decisions and actions.

She suffers an identity crisis, allowing herself to be re-shaped by others, trying on personae in attempting to figure out who she is after the trauma.

Terrance offers her a choice that he (Terrance) can make this, “… the worst night of that man’s life. While the hints had probably been clearer to the reader than the main character, the way the reveals were piled on each other in the final section gave it a punchy feeling.

I think all we can do, as you say, is to try to act well in our own lives and hope that our higher-ups will be influenced by our collective example. Second, Cleave wrote this novel in a six-week marathon after the 2004 Madrid bombings, but before the 2005 bombings in London.May Day' is described well enough, and Cleave shows a nice touch in dropping in some of the changes that it causes in asides (a nurse suspended from her job, because Muslims have been suspended (for an "indefinite but temporary" time) from jobs where they might pose a security risk; the observation that: "you can't leave a ciggie butt unattended these days without someone coming and doing a controlled explosion on it"), but for the most part one doesn't get much of a feel for the changed atmosphere.