Fire Colour One, Jenny Valentine

Pages: 256

Publisher: Harper Collins

Release Date: 2^nd July 2015

Edition: UK e-proof, NetGalley review copy

Other Titles from this Author: Finding Violet Park, Broken Soup, The Ant Colony, The Double Life of Cassiel Roadnight

A bold and brilliant novel about love, lies and redemption from award-winning author, Jenny Valentine – one of the greatest YA voices of her generation.

Iris’s father, Ernest, is at the end of his life and she hasn’t even met him. Her best friend, Thurston, is somewhere on the other side of the world.

Everything she thought she knew is up in flames.

Now her mother has declared war and means to get her hands on Ernest’s priceless art collection. But Ernest has other ideas. There are things he wants Iris to know after he’s gone. And the truth has more than one way of coming to light.

It’s been five years since Jenny Valentine’s last book, but Fire Colour One was completely worth the wait. Utterly brilliant.

Jenny Valentine’s writing is breathtakingly beautiful. Her prose is almost poetry and the story and characters practically leap off the page. I especially loved the part that fire played in the novel. Iris is, well, she’s a pyromaniac. She’s captivated by the look of fire, by the way it clears her mind and cleanses the space it burns. It’s a rejuvenating for her and it’s something that she started doing as a way to make herself feel better, and it’s one of the few things that continues to work.

Iris has an awful family and home life with her mum, who makes Iris call her by her first name, and her husband. Hannah just doesn’t really care about Iris, except about what she can use her for and the embarrassment she causes her. She just has no regard for Iris at all and it’s so sad to read about, but it makes her developing relationship with her dad even more touching. It was lovely to see Iris go from apathy to grudging interest to outright love for Ernest as she learned the truth about why he hadn’t bene a part of her life and they shared a love of art.

Fire Colour One is beautiful, poignant, bittersweet and has a hell of an ending. I recommend you all read it right away!

Sophie