Calor by J.J. Fischer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Calor is the first installment in the Nightingale saga, a completed epic fantasy trilogy followed by a standalone sequel. The entire series is inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s beloved short story, “The Nightingale,” and also includes notes of the Hades and Persephone myth. I was enraptured by Calor from the very beginning. The worldbuilding is fascinating, the characters are compelling and sympathetic, the writing is lovely and incredibly engaging, and the pacing never falters.

In this world, the largest form of currency are memories, which can be extracted for a price and sold in vials to the wealthy, whose gluttonous consumption of these memories allow them to ignore the broken world around them and live inside gilded recollections of happier times. Lovely memories are extracted, and dark memories muted, but mems, a type of alter who can access the memories of others. Alters are individuals born with supernatural gifts. Mems are but one type of alter among many. Some can heal, or inspire courage, or distinguish truth from falsehood. Then there are darker alters, those who use their gifts for harm.

Calor touches on some deep, heartfelt themes. We are shown the horrors of living with deep, unrelenting grief, and we see that contrasted with fervent hope, held even in the darkest of times. Through both their gifts and their blossoming friendships, the characters beautifully demonstrate the importance of allowing others to help bear your burdens, and how insisting on shouldering that load alone is in actuality a selfish decision, not a selfless one. We also see how you can’t divorce joy from sorrow; both your highest highs and your lowest lows are a part of your story, which falls apart when you try to extract the pain from it.

I immediately fell for the characters. Sephone is a powerful mem. She has been a slave for as long as she can remember, and recalls nothing of her parents or the first four years of her life. Dorian is a respected thane who has fallen from power. He’s good and noble down to his bones, but the traumatic loss of his family has left him so broken that he sees no point in even trying to reassemble the shattered pieces. And then there’s the secondary cast. Cass, a lumen who can’t control his powers of visible truth detection, unless he’s drunk and chasing a skirt. Bas and Bear, Dorian’s trusted bodyguards. And of course Jewel, a snow-white wolf with the understanding of a human. I adore well-crafted animal companions, and she’s among the best I’ve read.

There is a faith component to Calor, but it’s light. I have hope that faith is one of the components that will be delved into more deeply as the series progresses. The same could be said for the romance. There is yearning, though it’s mostly one-sided. I’m not sure if there will be development on that front, but the possibility exists. Fischer left herself so many elements to explore, so many questions to answer and so much room for her characters to grow. I’m excited to see what happens next.

There is not a single element of this story that I did not love. I was blown away by Fischer’s craftsmanship. While this is the first of her books that I’ve read, she has the talent and the writing chops to stand alongside Sanderson and Gwynne, Lynch and Lawrence and the host of other mainstream fantasy authors I’ve read and loved through the years. The world was fleshed out enough to be completely engaging and believable while still leaving so much room for interesting exploration in the next installments. And the characters stole my heart. I can’t wait to watch them grow through the rest of the series. There is a cliffhanger here, but as the trilogy and even the standalone sequel are complete and out in the world, that’s not something I want to complain about. Instead, it compels me to pick up the second book, Lumen, immediately. I’m not much of a binge reader, but I will absolutely be binging my way through every Nightingale book.

You can purchase this book directly from the publisher, Enclave, or from: Amazon, Audible, Bookshop.org, Libro.fm.

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