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We Set the Dark on Fire by Tehlor Kay Mejia is a young adult novel that follows teenager Daniela as she navigates becoming one of the wives to a vicious up-and-coming young man while simultaneously becoming a secret member of the rebel group La Voz that undermines him and those like him on his way to the top. The girls at the Medio School for Girls are trained for five years to either be perfect Primeras or Segundas. Every rich, distinguished young man gets assigned two wives at the Medio School’s graduation ceremony: one Primera, to be his equal and his defender, and one Segunda, to bear his children and support him emotionally. In Medio, this is considered the norm. Though the privileged claim that this is a decree by the Sun God who himself chose two wives to stand opposite each other, Dani, the best Primera the Medio School for Girls has ever produced, soon finds out the truth: that the rich and powerful will use whatever they can to get and keep what they want, no matter the cost to those less privileged who live on the other side of the wall.
The world Mejia builds is so detailed and expansive. The book opens with a prologue detailing the story of how the Sun God attained his two wives through a fight with his brother the Salt God, and at the end of it, you find out that this is the introduction to the rulebook that the girls at the school have to follow. After that, each chapter opens with a different rule for Primeras from the Medio School for Girls Handbook, 14th edition. Each rule applies to the chapter in which it appears, and the reader gets to watch as Dani starts to bend them or use them in ways the Medio School never would have approved of the more she gets involved with La Voz. As it turns out, a lot of her Primera training makes her a good spy. She is quiet, determined, able to hide her emotions, and knows how to look someone over for weaknesses. As Sota, the leader of La Voz, says at one point, Dani is “a hundred shades of a girl.” She knows how to hide her true emotions and layer another emotion or façade on top of it that she wants other people to see. She’s been able to keep her real pedigree a secret for years by becoming the best Primera she can be. She has to be the best; her parents risked everything to get her onto this side of the wall that separates the powerful from the weak. Her identification papers are fake, and she has been able to get by until the night of her graduation when Sota comes into the Medio School for Girls and starts Dani on the path to becoming more than a Primera or a girl trying to live a life only her parents wanted for her.
Dani’s growing relationship with Carmen, the Segunda to the man Dani marries, is another strong point of the book. The novel’s first chapters paint a picture of Carmen and Dani’s tumultuous relationship as girls who were almost friends until Carmen chose to be her bully instead, and I read that and immediately thought, Yep, that’s the love interest. I couldn’t wait to see how things would change for them, and Mejia did not disappoint. There’s a sweet quote later in the book from Carmen to Dani that had me texting my friend because it hit so well. They are two girls in a bad situation finding comfort in each other. Even when Dani isn’t sure who she can trust or who knows the truth about her, she decides to trust Carmen. Anyone who reads sapphic literature would be able to see Dani’s repressed feelings miles before she figures them out herself. Carmen knows she likes girls and tells Dani a whole story about how she figured it out in her youth, but liking anybody is new for Dani, since Primeras aren’t supposed to care about things like love or lust. Those emotions are saved for the Segundas, so even kissing is new for Dani. She waxes poetic several times about Carmen’s kisses, and it’s so sweet every time.
My only real criticism of the book is with their husband, Mateo. He is very one-dimensional. There’s no such thing as a redeeming quality to be found in the guy. He’s controlling, he doesn’t believe in letting his Primera do what she spent her teen years perfecting for the day she would become a wife, and he plays a central role in getting Dani’s ex-roommate arrested as a sympathizer to the resistance. You’re not supposed to like him, not even for a second. From his first entrance in the book, Dani dislikes how he treats her, and it just gets worse from there. This fell flat for me a couple times, simply because he’s supposed to be this suave rich boy intent on becoming president someday. A man trying to reach that level and be elected by his people would probably have a few qualities worth voting for, but Mateo simply doesn’t. He’s a villain, and that’s all he is. I wish he’d been given the opportunity to grow a little bit as a character, even if that growth was backwards, but he’s the same at the start of the book as he is at the end of it. Carmen and Dani both change so much, but Mateo is static. I guess it makes the decision Dani comes to about officially joining the rebellion more black and white, but I would have loved to see Mateo slowly slip into the person Dani knows him to be instead of Mateo being insufferable and awful from the jump.
Despite that, I’m really glad I read this book again. I remembered liking it a lot the first time I read it years ago but had forgotten too much to jump into the sequel. Everything I did remember still hit, and everything I didn’t made me love the book more and more. Mejia captured me from the first page, and I read the entire novel in a day. Her world is so vivid, and I cared about Dani and Carmen almost immediately. I have the sequel, We Unleash the Merciless Storm, on my desk right now and am looking forward to diving headlong into it. I’m desperate to know how things turn out for Dani and Carmen after the heart wrenching reveal at the end of We Set the Dark on Fire, and I’m so excited to see where Mejia takes them.
Trigger warnings for: death, a graphic depiction of Dani getting burned, and violence.
