I’ve gotten stuck.

I loved Tamora Pierce’s Circle of Magic series, her first quartet about Sandry, Briar, Daja, and Tris. I was eager to read the next quartet. For the most part, I still am.

I breezed through the first two books in this quartet. Sandry’s book (Magic Steps) and Briar’s book (Street Magic) both went by so quickly that I nearly inhaled them. Daja’s book, Cold Fire, has really slowed me down.

I try to find times in the day when I can sneak in a little bit of reading. Often enough this ends up being at night while I’m lying in bed. I’ll read a chapter, then set the book down. Except with Cold Fire reading a chapter leaves me feeling sick to my stomach. Stopping there doesn’t help.

I’ve discovered the hard way that I find it difficult to read a story about arson, especially when lives are lost.

Look, there’s no way for me to dig into this without spoiling things. I still haven’t finished the book, but I’m going to talk about important details from about two thirds through. If you don’t want Cold Fire spoiled for you, find something else here to read.

*SPOILERS FOLLOW*

Ready?

My first big stumbling block was that I didn’t want the villain to be the villain. I followed in Daja’s footsteps and liked the character of Bennat Ladradun. I was less blinded to his being the villain than Daja is, given that it was pretty easy to guess he’d been starting the fires from the very first ‘arsonist’s perspective’ segment in the book. I wasn’t quite sure whether Tamora Pierce was doing the obvious thing there and making Ben the baddie, or whether she was laying the reader’s suspicion at his feet and misdirecting her audience. Either way, I saw where she was going.

That disjointed feeling, being pretty certain that I knew who the baddie was while also feeling disappointed by who the baddie was, didn’t excite me. Reading more felt like work. I had to push myself through that disjointed feeling. That slowed me down significantly.

Then of course there’s the transformational bad-guy reveal scene, in which Ben revels in the power that he felt after his fire killed people. Somehow that made reading easier for me. It wasn’t easier because I felt better about Ben being the baddie—I didn’t. The scene itself felt nigh-comical, oddly forced for what I knew so far about the character. I didn’t feel like Ben was a better written or more convincing villain after that scene, and he still feels pretty iffy as villains go. But he’d been so clearly painted as a villain that I gave up on trying to resist. He was the story’s villain, like it or not. I read on.

And then there was the nursery fire.

This was not good for me to read late at night. I think enough about the danger of fire in a structure as is. I think about how to ensure that I can get my family out of our home safely. I think about where our fire extinguishers are. Reading about children and babies being caught in a fire and asphyxiating from smoke inhalation, that’s nightmare fuel for me.

I think I would have found this disturbing before my child was born. It may not have been as immediately, personally impactful, but it would have been sad. After my baby’s birth, after his struggle to breathe in the minutes, hours, and days after he was born, reading about a baby asphyxiating is, uh, bad. Very bad.

Like I said, it’s nightmare fuel.

I’m around two thirds of the way through this book. Given how reading it has made me feel so far, I’m not very excited about the rest of it. I certainly don’t want to read it while lying in bed, just before going to sleep.

At the same time, I do like Tamora Pierce and I do like the character of Daja. I want to see the rest of Daja’s story here. I just wish that she could have a different book.

I will finish this book. I’ll probably enjoy it, in the end. I will at least be glad that I finished it.

Until then? Oof.