With Fire in Their Blood by Kat Delacorte Review

With Fire In Their Blood is a simmering supernatural romance set in the crumbling Italian city of Castello, where mafia clans make the rules, dark magic pulses the streets and the sins of the past threaten to consume the present. Perfect for fans of These Violent Delights, The Darkest Minds and V.E. Schwab.

When sixteen-year-old Lilly Deluca arrives in Castello, she isn’t impressed. A secluded town in the Italian mountains is not where she saw her last years of high school playing out.

Divided for generations by a brutal clan-family war, the two halves of Castello are kept from destroying each other by the mysterious General, a leader determined to maintain order and ‘purity’. . . whatever the cost.

Lilly falls in with the rebellious Liza, brooding Nico and sensitive Christian, and sparks begin to fly. But in a city where love can lead to ruin, Lilly isn’t sure she can trust anyone - not even herself.

And then she accidentally breaks Castello's most important rule: when the General's men come to test your blood, you'd better not be anything more than human . . .

General Impressions

"With Fire in Their Blood" got to my house at exactly the right moment since I had been longing for a low-stakes YA fantasy and was curious about this book in particular after seeing it around online and loving the synopsis.

I was immediately enraptured by the first chapter and let my expectations get the better of me and up and up until the midway point of the book I was happy enough. The characters and settings reminded me a lot of the 2010s YA fantasy that was the entryway into fantasy for a lot of us with a goody two shoes female main character victim of parental abuse and alienation, the moving to a new place, the incredibly beautiful and tortured multiple male love interests with dark secrets that the heroine kept being attracted to. There is a reason why all of those tropes are present in so many of our favourite books and it's because they work but I was ultimately waiting for the author to turn the story on its head in order to reflect the downsides of that kind of simplistic characterization that a lot of readers outgrew and in order to reflect the ways our society changed in the types of stories we consume.

While I did enjoy the synopsis and the story at its core, there was ultimately too much that fell short for me to enjoy it. If this was set in the first half of the twentieth century and the author accounted for the political upheaval at the time or even in a setting less grounded in reality it would have worked much better for me but there is no way I would ever believe a Gen Z would simply shrug at moving to a closed city in the middle of developed Europe where an obscure religious figure is able to become a dictator and control a few hundreds of people without the Italian and International governments knowing about it and intervening. Even when accounting for the isolation and inherited mobster culture and history in a small town this story is not believable. But ultimately the nail in the coffin for me was that the main character does not think or question herself, she simply reacts to what others do and keeps going, being that when it comes to the city and her love interests. She has no believable agency, she is simply a blank slate with a story of abuse, same as everyone in this book.

I quickly lost all hope and interest in this story but I decided to finish it since I was past the halfway point and there was one aspect that I was curious to see how the author would resolve. While the main character does have two or three dark and tortured possible love interests, some of those love interests have interesting relationships with one another themselves and she also has a canon female love interest so the only novelty in this story really was those queer and poly aspects and I wanted to see how they would be handled.

My expectations were low but this book still fell short of them by turning the female love interest into a betrayer that was ultimately punished. The book ends with a big battle but no bodies so guess the sequel is set.

Although this book definitely did not meet my expectations and simply did not work for me as a reader, I want to stress that I did see a lot of plots and settings that were extremely interesting and original so I'm definitely curious about Kat Delacorte's future projects because I do think she has a lot of promise and lot of my now favourite authors had had worse debuts

Thank you to Penguin Random House Uk for this copy

Rating: 2.5/5