Between Two Fires

This is a very good book but also a wild and sometimes unhinged experience.

I love historical fiction and when you add war, violence, gritty threats, pestilence and plague with fetid graves full of horror you're onto a winner.

It's real and ambient with twitters of birds and rustlings of cornfields, rife with imperceptible dread, fear and genuinely scary moments like stone statues knocking on doors to terrorize frozen families, and even when the far-fetched fantasy elements kick in, there's still enough realistic story progression to anchor down believability.

Best of all is the tender relationship between the three travelers and how they learn to trust and care for each other, and the French rural-to-city setting and the protective guardianship between Thomas and Delphine with subtle tones of Les Miserables.

However, the fantasy elements sometimes go too far, being so weirdly out there and taking away the grit of the historical fiction - that's history with a fictional element, not full on fantasy. It can be a strange mix.

The increasingly strong religious element is sometimes hard to accept as well, plus the distracting dream sequences in italics, unexplained walking dead, transmogrifications, battles between heaven and hell, and even more outlandish and weirdly unhinged action.

It's a personal preference thing and just because the book regularly veers away from believable reality doesn't make it bad! Take a mix of Victor Hugo and Miguel de Cervantes and ask them to rewrite Don Quixote on acid in the 21st century and you might get closer to understanding this book.

Or just read it and make up your own mind, it's surely worth it.

I expected so much that anything less was going to be a disappointment anyway with so much hype and expectations, and perhaps because Between Two Fires needs less mayonnaise and more crude humor:

“I know what’s different about you.”

“What?”

“You’ve got tits.”

Between Two Fires is gritty and unique, entertaining and bereft of hope in medieval, plague-ridden France, but once pestilence is no longer the threat and religious fantasy takes over in the latter part it becomes a different type of experience and loses a star because of that, but other than that it's an amazing read.

There's a lot going on in this book, too much maybe, in a crazily imaginative story that's often overwhelming, fantastical and religious, where less can sometimes be more.