Review by Frank Plowright
The ground shifted quite considerably last time, and there’s now an urgency about Trellis recovering some lost memories. These are accessible, but reaching where they’re stored is a dangerous occupation. Additionally it seems that while the Stonekeepers have been presented as a force for good, they may in the past have buried secrets of their own. That’s enough to occupy Emily and Trellis, but Navin and Aly are a long way from home, so Firelight also looks in on their attempts to return.
Kazu Kibuishi’s plots always surprise, but even taking that into account Kibuishi excels in Firelight. Navin and Aly take the most unlikely short term jobs, but it’s Emily’s path that’s the most emotionally draining, with constant dreams of her dead father. Kibuishi experiments with the art on this sequence, his art laid over photographs of scenery. It just about works, but the pages are better when he’s actually drawing everything, and it’s noticeable that after the abundance of painted spreads in Escape From Lucien there are fewer here. The end credits now note Jason Caffoe as solely responsible for backgrounds and colour.
Emily’s initial dreams of her father are a foreshadowing of what occurs later, and it’s even more heartbreaking than the earlier sequence, and she has further trials to face as she learns more about the stone she carries. This is via another returned character, one of Amulet’s many wonders being that no-one’s ever redundant. We may not see someone for a while, but it’s now certain they’ll eventually return. It’s also a long time before the title has a relevance, yet that’s also grim. Kibuishi doesn’t generally end on a cliffhanger, but does so with Firelight, which leads into Supernova.
Despite the title of this volume, Amulet hasn’t been this dark since moments early in the series when Emily and Navin’s mother seemed beyond help, and then the dread wasn’t as sustained. This isn’t a happy outing overall, and the Voice controlling the Elf King finishes the book even stronger than ever. Yet it’s always darkest before the dawn.
