Leda Morley has just discovered she stands between the world and total devastation in Alison Levy’s second book, Blue Flame.
As a gatekeeper, Leda is descended from a long line of women responsible for keeping Apep, a chaos daemon, from devouring the sun and spinning the world – at least the Notan dimension – into complete oblivion. After barely escaping the a terrifying journey to the world of Arcana, Leda has decided to learn everything she can about these alternate dimensions and the rules controlling them. Rachel Wilde, a collector in charge of sending defective daemons back home for repair, has agreed to allow Leda to shadow her on her job in order to collect as much data as possible. However, both Leda and Rachel get more than they bargain for when they investigate a market already familiar to Rachel.
Naji El Sayed, the young son of the owners, has accidentally brought a Djinn into the Notan world, and the creature is bent on revenge and attempting to murder Naji’s mother. Rachel worries she won’t be able to help the family at all until she finds help in an unlikely place, a formerly homeless oracle. Bach Chesterfield spent six months living under a bridge and raging against the images constantly bombarding him until Rachel rescued him and moved him into her house, but will this unlikely hero have the courage to step up before it’s too late?
Bach is truly a shining character in this novel. In this second installment of the series, the reader will see his backstory and his personality come forward.
Having spent the last six months living under a bridge with other homeless people, Bach is terrified of “normal” life. He knows it would be incredibly easy to slip back into his previous life of obliviousness, but he refuses to do that. With the help of Simon Morley, Leda’s brother, he is painstakingly attempting to rebuild his shattered existence and overwhelmed mind from the wealthy parents who disowned him to the partner who kept his belongings and moved on.
Seeing the past, present, and future of most people and creatures he meets has left Bach consumed and imprisoned within his own gift, but his resiliency to retake his life is touching. Even though he knows it’s impossible, he would help every person on the planet if he could, and he insists on giving back to those who helped him along the way, going so far as to track down a fellow homeless man who acted as his protector and giving him the information he needs to find the daughter who desperately wants to find him.
When he must confront the Djinn, he finds a strength he never knew he possessed and even manages to bring forward the “humanity” within the being. Bach’s role in the plot cannot be undervalued and promises to be one of prominence within future installments.
Leda and Rachel present an intriguing dichotomy. The women share a few similarities, yet their differences really highlight the unique world-building within the novel.
The work of these women is one such area. While Leda loves learning about diverse cultures and has a voracious thirst for customs and language, she hates her job working for an administrator at a local museum. Her boss is lazy, often requiring her to perform his duties then complaining when the quality suffers following her near-death kidnapping and subsequent injury. She detests the harassment and sexualization she feels within her workplace and longs for the kind of world where that would never happen – a world like Arcana.
In Rachel’s matriarchal society, a woman would never experience such an insult. She has a much more equalized workplace, but she, unlike Leda, has no love for what she does. Five years into her eight-year length of service, Rachel wants out. She dreams of returning to her family’s farm. Though she answers Leda’s myriad questions, she’s often confused by Leda’s conflicting emotions so different from her own background.
Faith is, perhaps, the biggest and most significant difference. Leda struggles to reconcile her Christian upbringing where demons and angels hold supernatural posts with Rachel’s dogmatic practical explanation of inter-dimensional creatures malfunctioning on Earth’s plane. Though she sees the daemon in action, she cannot believe the stories she remembers so fondly are make-believe. Rachel cannot see them as anything but broken creatures needing help. However, while their discrepancies leave Leda with questions, her faith, interestingly, doesn’t diminish.
The Daemon Collecting Series is a great spin on an age-old stereotype. It’s fun, engaging characters will create a fantastical journey without leaving the very world surrounding us.
