Why "The Fire & Ice Book Series" is Middle Grade Fiction | Olivia J

"The road to hell is paved with adverbs," -Stephen King

I love indie authors. I love supporting indie authors. It's basically a part of my brand at this point. 

I also believe that all feedback is good feedback - save from things that are purely subjective and comments that aren't constructive criticism. 

I know that a lot of people love this series. I know that Erin has found a lot of success with this series, and that's great. I'm glad other people have enjoyed it and have been inspired by it. 

However, I personally don't get the hype. 

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If you're interested, my review for The Elementals can be found under the 2 star rating section here, and my review for The Lost Dreamer can be found under the 3 star rating section here, but they're not essential to understanding this blog post. 

But let's get on with why you actually clicked on this blog post . . . 

The Fire & Ice Book Series is Middle Grade Fiction

Forbes herself brands the Fire & Ice Book Series as a YA fantasy series, which is incorrect on several levels. The characters are sixteen, so that must mean it's YA, right? 

Wrong. 

This series is Middle Grade. It's not Young Adult.  It's important that you know this right off the bat, because if you go into this book thinking it's MG fantasy, then you'll probably like it. Unfortunately, I went into F&I series believing that it was YA, and this greatly impacted my perception of the series. 

I found this amazing article on Writer's Digest about the key differences between MG and YA.  It makes compelling points on why F&I is not YA. I will be using this article as evidence to support my points. I highly recommend checking this post out - it's super insightful.

The complexity and themes are what differentiates these two genres - not just age ranges. MG usually has to do with friendship, family, and the character's reactions to the immediate world around them. However, YA concerns itself with love, changing relationships, how the character fits into the world on a grander scale, and self-discovery/reflection. YA often tackles heavier and more nuanced content and themes, and MG has more of a focus on adventure and good overcoming evil. 

In all these cases, F&I fits the criteria for MG and not YA. I'm not saying that F&I should have been grimdark, but what I am saying is that in order for F&I to truly qualify for a YA title, it must earn it by fulfilling the conventions of the genre. 

For example, our main character Alice Hanley - and all of the characters for that matter - are undeniably good. The Elementals are good, and the Creatures of the Night Oak Forest and Cleo Lennox are bad. This kind of simplistic, black and white categorization is usually nowhere to be found in YA books, because teens have the self-awareness that the world and people are much more complex than that. When reading The Lost Dreamer, I felt so much sympathy for Cleo Lennox. She has the potential to be such an interesting and nuanced character in future books, but Erin glossed over all of the interesting things we could have explored with Cleo and wrote her as evil and vindictive. Granted, the end of The Lost Dreamer left this plot open-ended, so I'm hoping for some more interesting development with Cleo. 

The problem is that the way F&I goes about tackling its themes is characteristic of MG. Things are allowed to be a bit more cut-and-dry in MG, but not YA. F&I does a whole lot of telling in every aspect (characters, world, everything), which, again, you can get away with more in MG than in YA - and this is due to the nature of the audience. Older teenagers are able to think for themselves and deduce information from context clues - aspects of the story and characters can be more subtle, nuanced, and not stated outright. In contrast, middle-grade readers need to be spoon-fed certain aspects. And this isn't bad, it's just a hallmark of the genre. 

Now I'm not saying that Middle Grade isn't as deep or as complex as Young Adult,  because that's simply not true. What I am saying is that the two genres are deep and complex in different ways, and they both have different methods of going about it. 

To clarify, the fact that I'm insisting that F&I is not YA and is MG is not necessarily critique of the work itself. It's a critique of the branding and the genre choice that Erin Forbes has made. She would find much more success if she branded F&I as MG instead of YA. 

If you go into reading this with the mindset that The Fire & Ice Book Series is an uplifting and whimsical Middle Grade series, then you'll probably enjoy them. 

~

*Phew*. That was a lot. Congrats if you made it to the end.  I haven't done one of this literary analysis blog posts in a while, mostly because they take a lot of time and mental energy, and those are two things I'm quite short of these days. 

~The WordShaker