There is something rotting in Harrisville.
It's 1944 and Veronica works so she can afford to eat. Maybe one day she will save enough to own the home her family is living in, but for now, she doesn't have time for fanciful thoughts, or much else. She doesn't have time for the fire whispering to her, the ghosts trying to talk to her and the son of her boss, who can't stop staring at her. She definitely doesn't have time to think about Lazlo, the handsome black soldier that she processed at the draft office, but she can't seem to stop herself. As her ability to ignore Lazlo evaporates, so does her self-imposed ignorance about her hometown. There is, and always has been, something rotten in Harrisville. It shouldn't have been a surprise. After all, Veronica works in the cigarette factory, where corpses hide in the tobacco with the roaches.
What did I think?
I was drawn to Fanning Fireflies by the stunning cover and it as mesmerising inside and out. I didn't realise it was the third book in The Limerent series when I started to read it and it can definitely be read as a standalone but I now want to read the earlier books.
Set in 1944, it's shocking to see the prejudices that people experienced in our not so distant past. Love doesn't see the colour of your skin so when Veronica meets Lazio she can't stop thinking about him and vice versa. Lazio is sent to fight in World War II but he writes to Veronica and he meets her every night in his dreams.
Veronica works in a cigarette factory and she has a gift (or a curse) that enables her to see ghosts and there are a surprising number of them in the factory. When women from the town start going missing, the coloured residents are blamed but Veronica's gift holds the key to what is really happening to the missing women.
Mixing fantasy with historical fiction and romance, Fanning Fireflies is a genre-busting novel that completely blew me away. It's so beautifully written and completely mesmerising that I couldn't put it down and I couldn't stop thinking about it long after I turned the final page. The love story is just stunning and it adds an abundance of light to the shocking darkness of the racial prejudice. A highly recommended read and one I will definitely be reading again.
I received a gifted paperback to read and review for the blog tour and this is my honest and unbiased opinion.
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