Blue Fire (Healing Wars Series #2)

Part fugitive, part hero, fifteen-year-old Nya is barely staying ahead of the Duke of Baseer’s trackers. Wanted for a crime she didn’t mean to commit, she risks capture to protect every Taker she can find, determined to prevent the Duke from using them in his fiendish experiments. But resolve isn’t enough to protect any of them, and Nya soon realizes that the only way to keep them all out of the Duke’s clutches is to flee Geveg. Unfortunately, the Duke’s best tracker has other ideas.

Nya finds herself trapped in the last place she ever wanted to be, forced to trust the last people she ever thought she could. More is at stake than just the people of Geveg, and the closer she gets to uncovering the Duke’s plan, the more she discovers how critical she is to his victory. To save Geveg, she just might have to save Baseer—if she doesn’t destroy it first.

School Library Journal

Gr 6 8—Mysterious relationships and unacknowledged royal heirs emerge in Hardy's neo-futuristic sequel to The Shifter (HarperCollins, 2009). Because of her ability to shift pain, 15-year-old Nya is highly valuable to the evil dictator ruling her kingdom. She is even more coveted than the other healers, yet she and her underground revolutionary friends risk their freedom to fight the Duke's wrongful power. While selling goods at the markets, she tries to help a desperate street urchin and gets captured by rogue kidnappers. She is taken to the capital city, where her captors intend to collect the bounty on her head from the Duke. After escaping, Nya is determined to save her imprisoned friends and sister. A series of high-stakes adventures ensues, with the teen using her unique ability to harness pain as her greatest weapon. Nya is a strong and capable heroine who struggles with moral dilemmas throughout this fantasy, yet the story falls flat. More questions are raised than answered, and readers may be confused by the complex rules and unexplained entities. Action sequences and the progression through time are awkward. All in all, this book is disappointing.—Tara Kehoe, Plainsboro Public Library, NJ

A longtime fantasy reader, Janice Hardy has always wondered about the darker side of healing. She tapped into her own dark side to create a world where healing could be dangerous, and those with the best intentions often made the worst choices. She lives in Georgia with her husband, four cats, and one nervous freshwater eel.