Er, really it doesn't matter, I just wanna talk about it for a bit. (Also, like, the book is almost old enough to vote so I have no hesitancy in spoiling the whole thing. If that's an issue for you, that's fair! But you have been warned.)
The core of the Elemental Masters books (and why I'm willing to concede that The Fire Rose is one) is the basis in fairy tales. The Fire Rose is a play on Beauty and the Beast, and one of the more interesting, if flawed, ones.
(It should be noted that, for all the flaws, I genuinely enjoy all of the Elemental Masters books in their own right. When I talk about the flaws, it's coming from a place of love.)
TW in regards to this book: the book has suicidal thoughts, reference to slavery and abuse, sexual assault and torture. The latter is not particularly detailed, but enough to be disturbing to some. Also, racism. (I'm not 100% sure but I will just say in general that a slur for Romani ppl is used often and regularly in the entire series so watch out for that.)
The year is 1905, and Rosalind (known as Rose) is recently orphaned, in debt up to her eyebrows, with nobody to help and no prospects in Chicago. Jason, a wealthy railway baron who accidentally deformed and disabled himself through an attempt at changing forms (he's vaguely werewolf-y), stalks her mildly and issues her a job offer that she was designed not to refuse, a lie of a job offer to bring her to an isolated California Mansion. He wrote to her mentor and said "I have two kids, a sick boy and a smart girl, they need a tutor educated in [exactly the things Rose is educated in]". He has an enemy mage who has subverted Jason's creepy secretary, and the plot divides time between creepy secretary doing evil things while working against Jason and Jason and Rose working towards a cure while Rose learns that magic exists/learns how to magic.
One of the flaws of a lot of Elemental Masters books, and indeed some other Lackey books I can name, is the temptation to make the main character a little overtly 'logical'. Like too often the character will approach a situation 'logically' to arrive at a conclusion that is, frankly, illogical (if true), in order to be plot convenient.
Like Rose is completely baffled by the utterly quiet 'servants' (they turn out to be magical creatures) and the lack of ever seeing, like, a single cook. But she's not unnerved by it until, like, well into the novel when she is being introduced to the concepts of magic (real magic, in universe). Like it's not until she's Ready to accept magic as a Thing that she starts to go 'hey like I have literally seen only Jason's creepy secretary the whole time I've been here, that's weird, and I need an explanation, because this seems not only creepy but really invasive'.
It's to the point where she's worried that the creepy secretary is the one who's bringing stuff in and out of her room all the time, and that thought... kinda creeps her out? Except not enough to really question it, I guess. Like it's very Plot Convenient I guess, the rate at which she finally realizes there's, like, maybe three people on the whole property at any given time.
What would have made this book really a lot more interesting is if Lackey would have let the character be as creeped out as occasionally was warranted, maybe even let her come to a somewhat reasonable if incorrect conclusion. Like, she only lays eyes on one other person for a good portion of the book, and never meets Jason in the flesh. It would have been great if at some point she was like 'maybe ghosts???? harmless ghosts but maybe???' and was creeped out but the money and perks were still pretty good so...
Or totally freaked out about it to the point of asking Jason, so he alters the methods by which his 'servants' aid her in a way to have an easier explanation but she's still like 'where tf is everybody? for real?' And maybe she can just dismiss it that first night because she's so tired and still grief stricken and what not and gets settled before she goes 'hey wait this is still weird just less obviously so'.
I mean it's a little... gas lighty, honestly. But without having the character confront him about it, it's not openly gas lighting, which possibly Lackey was trying to avoid. I don't know which is better, tbh, there may not be a good answer that isn't, like, 'structurally change the entire book'.
Anyway, this leads me to Jason's personality. He's kind of an interesting male lead in that he's a lot more ambiguously good than many of the characters in the later elemental masters series.
It's just that, you know, not a whole lot was done with that. Like there could have been a 'this mindset worked when you looked like a person and were not possibly fighting with the wild angry wolf inside of you, but now that you have this issue you gotta work a lot harder at being a person and not an animal'. Or even Rose having the 'he's an asshole but he's my asshole' mindset which, like, fair. (The epilogue is, basically, HE'S NOW NICE FOREVER BECAUSE REASONS.)
Like in the text, Jason and his Enemy Fire Mage are barely discernable from one another, personality wise. One does magic the Right(tm) way and the other one does magic the Wrong and Evil (tm) way. They both know about the creepy secretary's 'habits' and Jason chooses to ignore whilst the Enemy Fire Mage encourages, but... like. The Creepy Secretary goes to whore houses specifically to 'break' the enslaved women who are not consigned to their lot. He violently and horribly rapes women, and Jason is essentially like 'enh' about it for most of the book. Like I know it's a fairy tale and there's expected to be a happy ending but it seems like Jason's personality turn around has no grounding in the text. There's no moment where Rose learns the truth about Creepy Secretary, takes it to Jason and he goes 'uh, so?', no point at which he mentally confronts himself about his own personal ambiguity. It's mentioned but in passing, and never comes up again.
It is what happens so often in many of these books, where the book itself is enjoyable enough but just narrowly missed being a much more interesting and complex book. There's really not much that separates Jason from his enemy, other than the enemy uses drugs and Jason only reluctantly takes opium for the pain (and leaves off when the Chinese doctor says 'hey drugs are bad mmkay take my herbs instead').
It's super common in the Elemental Masters books for the bad guys to Use Drugs and the good guys to Not. There's not a lot of nuance in most of them, and that's okay because they often clearly set out to not have that nuance (like they're fairy tales that's the whole point) but this is the one book in the series that could have stepped further out of bounds, and it's almost like she was too hesitant to do so.
As a note on the Chinese doctor: I hesitate to comment too much on how racist the portrayal is, it's very stereotypical in one sense, but I just don't know enough about Asian racism to make a full comment on it. There are good points: even before Rose knows he has studied Western Medicine, she treats him like a doctor. There is no attempt at writing in any stereotypical Chinese 'accent', and he is an Elemental Master in equivalent of strength to Jason, though his element is different, and he speaks of his magic being different from Western, but equivalent to. His 'wisdom' comes through a different knowledge base than Jason or Rose's (doctorin' rather than medieval languages or business) and not, like, he's just a wise old Chinese guy.
But he does fulfill that trope to enough of an extent that it's uncomfortable, plus in the end there's another Wise Old Chinese guy who kind of pops out of nowhere when convenient. There's a lot of talk about white slavery and stuff and how dangerous Chinatown is and whatnot, and I have no idea how period-accurate that is, but given that most of these stories are only vaguely period accurate anyway, I feel a lot of it coulda been done without.
(As well as, frankly, the rapist subplot of the creepy secretary. Which also delves into some pretty racist territory. Ugh.)
This is frankly, one of the darkest of the Elemental Masters books, in tone. But it really is a proto-Elemental Masters book, as the series develops you can see how far away from this start you get. (For example, a Plot Point of this book is that Fire Masters cannot Share a Town, or really a State, and the very next Elemental Masters book features two married Fire Masters so...)
You get some of the good parts of the Elemental Masters books- the great descriptions of food and clothing (look I'm a simple creature who takes comfort in simple things), there's some really great mutual unrequited love in this book which actually works- Jason's so wolfy that his face is less expressive than were he fully a dude, they both are really conscious of the class boundary, blah blah blah. It is, as always in these books, resolved in a way that's a little too pat, and the series as a whole could use more complexity (though some of it is present later in the series), there's a lot to enjoy here as well.
Oh, and for those of you who (like me) were super disappointed with how not-hot Beast was in the Disney movie, this book was possibly written with that in mind. Beast does not become Human.
What many of the other Elemental Masters books have, and this one lacks, is lots of magic. While the book centers around magic, it's mostly around the character learning magic in a way that... just they talk a lot about magic while not expressing how that magic is done, for the most part? Ceremonies and such are skipped around or mentioned but not put in frame. They apparently involve a lot of chalk diagrams and calling to the elements. She simplifies the magic system a lot, which leads to more fun with magic.
If you like the Elemental Masters books and want to read the Beginning, it's fine, but I definitely would not recommend starting the Elemental Masters books here.
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