Child of Flame

by Kate Elliott

Book Overview

Set in an alternate Europe where bloody conflicts rage, the fourth book of the Crown of Stars epic fantasy series continues the world-shaking conflict for the survival of humanity Far beyond the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0886778921
• ISBN13: 9780886778927
• Release Date: October 2000
• Publisher: Daw Books
• Length: 850 Pages
• Weight: 1.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.0" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Mysteries, mysteries, mysteries.

Kate Elliot is a wonderful writer. She creats amazing characters and pulls them all into an intricate series of plots and subplots.In Child of Flame Kate Elliot carries the reader along with Alain and Liath as they discover who they are and their places in the world. Kate Elliot loves to lead readers through mysteries. Alain and Liath's heritage are mysteries that she gets closer to solving in this outstanding book. Even though you get frustrated with not knowing what is within these characters, it just spurs you on to want to find out and get to the end of the book as fast as possible. Liaths birth circumstances are very interesting and surprising and the emotion at the time is very intense. While Alain's mystery still isn't solved, Kate Elliot has come closer to revealing what he really is.While Alain and Liath are the main characters, there are still other well developed characters such as Sanglant and King Henry. Liath and Sanglant's daughter, Blessing, surprised me with her developing character and even if her growing up so fast seems strange, it excites me to see her take a part in the book. In Child of Flame Kate Elliot brings you to the world of the Aoi, who are not what I expected them to be. They are brought a little more into the action, even though they don't yet take an active part outside of their own little world, besides teaching Liath a little of her magic. They are a divided people, some wanting to make peace and others just wanting to destroy.Even though this book was close to 1000 pages, every page was worth reading and I don't think there are any wasted pages. Every page brings you closer to the mysteries that we all want to solve.I recommend this book to anybody, because it is one of those books that draw people in to really care about what happens in the story. I would also recommend reading the first books in the series first, so your caught up on all thats going on.I would read this book again and again, but i have other books scheduled to read so i'll get to it.

A Review of Child of Flame

This is by far the best of Ms. Elliott's present series. There have been so many characters and subplots so far that it's been hard to really make an emotional attachment to any one, even Liath. However this book finally starts drawing things together in a cohesive manner. I think that one of Ms. Elliott's main problems is that she gets too caught up in her own subplots and loses her grasp on the main story, which seems to me to be what happened with her Jaran series. Although Jaran was a masterpiece, in my opinion, the other books lacked focus and sprawled out of control. But Child of Flame, as far reaching as it is, actually gains focus. I almost didn't read the book as I was disappointed with the others; I'm glad I did.

So good it could be dangerous

It is just not possible to say enough good things about this series. Child of Flame is incredible, and it deprived me of sleep because I could NOT put it down before 3:00 a.m. for three nights in a row! Actually all the books in the Crown of Stars series should come with warning labels, something like: The Surgeon General has determined that this book will cause you to forget to eat and sleep and may prove hazardous to your health. Seriously, Child of Flame brings forth staggering new revelations about the Aoi and about Liath's parentage. Alain finds himself thrown back in time to when the Aoi were still present on earth, Liath finally comes into her power and gets over her tendency to react to danger by running away, and my favorite character, Sanglant, shines very bright as he fights the Quman barbarians for the heartlands of Wendar, with no support from the absent king Henry who has fallen, alas, into bad company. Several subplots from previous novels that I feared might be going nowhere tie back into the main plot in surprising ways, and there are unpredictable plot twists galore. At the end I had to go back and reread the beginning, because my take on what was happening had changed so completely! My only reservation about this series is that I may perish from the suspense by the time the last (sixth) book comes out.

Great book!

"Child of Flame" is Kate Elliott's latest book in her series, Crown of Stars. It is mostly constrated on Alain and Liath who complete their mystical journeys of self-discovery. Also, this book sheds a little light on whereabouts of the rest of the cast. While Kate Elliott concentrates on developing main characters, the puzzling questions that linger after the last 3 books remain. This book is true to Kate's style; unexpected twists and turns will make you hate characters you liked just a moment ago and vice versa. However, Hugh and Anne remain the true villains of the story. Hopefully, the finale will soon follow.

This is fantasy at its best

The fourth book in Kate Elliott's ambitious Crown of Stars series is Child of Flame. Originally, Ms. Elliott had planned to do a trilogy, but as she herself admits, the plot quickly outgrew three books. In this book, Alain, the foundling who is seeking the truth of his heritage, is pulled into a struggle for power between his own kind and their worst enemy, the Cursed Ones. This struggle has existed for aeons. The other adventurers in the Crown of Stars books, Liath and Sanglant, and the exiled king, have their own business to mind, but this is Alain's book. The reader will feel every heartache and every pain as Alain searches for answers to questions he in some cases does not even know to ask. Kate Elliott's world of Crown of Stars owes a lot to her grounding in medieval history. Her stories are like a rich tapestry, meant to envelop the reader. Rickey R. Mallory