To Flame a Wild Flower

**Author:** Sarah A. Parker

**Estimated Reading Time:** 38 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** The cost of surviving what you have done, the lies we build our identities upon, and the terrifying intimacy of being truly seen by someone who refuses to look away.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who want their fantasy romance drenched in moral complexity, who prefer heroines that break before they heal, and who believe the most dangerous monsters are often the ones wearing crowns.

There is a particular kind of story that begins with a child hiding under a bed, and this is one of them. But the child is not hiding from a monster in the way you might expect. She is hiding from herself, from the cold that lives inside her, from the name people keep calling her that she does not recognize. Orlaith. The name belongs to someone else, someone with a past and a mother and a place in the world. The girl under the bed has none of those things. She has only the cold, the whispers, and a black hole in her chest that swallows everything. Sarah A. Parker's *To Flame a Wild Flower* is the third book in a fantasy romance series that has never been content to let its characters be simply good or evil. The novel picks up in the aftermath of an act that should be unforgivable: Orlaith has stabbed Rhordyn, the man who has protected her, imprisoned her, and loved her in ways she could not see until it was too late. She has driven a talon through his chest, and now she must live with the consequences. But living, for Orlaith, has always been the hardest part. What follows is a story about the prisons we build inside ourselves. Orlaith seals her grief in crystal domes, layer upon layer, until she can function. She walks through a world that wants to use her, to marry her, to sacrifice her, to kill her, and she keeps walking. She makes choices that corrode her soul because the alternatives are worse. She bares her throat to a monster because it is the only way to save the caged. She poisons her own lips to escape a forced consummation. She cuts a rope that sends a dying woman falling to her death because letting her climb would spread the Blight through an entire city. This is not a comfortable book. It does not offer easy redemption or clean victories. What it offers is something rarer: a portrait of a woman who has been told her entire life that she is a monster, who has believed it so completely that she has built her identity around it, and…