Fog & Fireflies: A Review

The book Fog & Fireflies by T.H. Lehnen, published on April 11, 2024, is, at its simplest, about a young girl lost in the fog. But to leave it at that would be a disservice to you and to the book.

This is a captivating, immersive novel about found family and the struggles of growing out of your childhood and family home. Its characters are well-developed, its settings distinct, weaving together to build a world of darkness, fear, and undiscovered magic.

“This is why we watch the fog.” The fog is almost sentient. It laps at the walls of town, taunting and sneaking its way around the town’s defenses, its only aim to kill the adults. Only the children, whom the fog cannot touch, can keep the fog from destroying their town.

Ogma, at fourteen, is on the precipice of adulthood. She feels the burdens and fears of the adults but understands the children better; patrolling the walls and living amongst other children is all she’s known. The idea of leaving the wall and the children and her life on the wall behind is more terrifying than the taunting, murderous fog could ever be. Or so she thinks.

When Ogma finds a foreign young man outside their walls one night, her daring rescue sets into motion events that lead beyond the safety of the walls and into the fog.

Thrust into an ever-shifting landscape where she quickly discovers not to trust even the ground beneath her feet, Ogma struggles to survive with nothing but her wits and her talent for making friends to keep her safe. Her only drive is to find her way back to the people and the life she left behind, but as the fog shifts around her, she learns to live outside the walls and begins to question the life she knew.

This book is a strong four stars. As stated above, Fog & Fireflies possesses engaging characters, solid worldbuilding, and an imaginative and clever plot.

There are a lot of characters in this book. We don’t see most of them for very long, but each of them is distinct and memorable. I had no difficulty following and empathizing with the different characters throughout the book, which is quite a feat, considering the first few chapters introduce at least fifteen different characters, most of them children.

Ogma, the main character, is introduced as a brave and fearless child who’s not afraid to question the adults and lead the other children, though she’s not the one in charge. Her fearlessness is a key trait throughout the book, but there are times when she throws tantrums or sulks as children and teenagers are wont to do, and it’s a pointed reminder of how young she is.

Wheeler, a pivotal side character, is the oldest of the children on the wall and is defined by his fear early on, which means to many in town that he’s too old to still be on the wall with the children. While he possesses many strong leadership traits and does his best to lead the children well and safely, his fear in the face of the fog is stronger.

Dunkirk, another pivotal side character, is foreign to the fog and the town. When Ogma saves him outside the wall of the town, he doesn’t know them or their language. All he wants is to return to his friends, but he knows there’s no way back to where he was, especially since he can’t communicate with anyone. His character is a good balance between Ogma’s drive and Wheeler’s caution: he wants to go back to what he knew before, but he knows he can’t, and that makes him cautious of what lies ahead in case something like that happens again.

A sidenote on Dunkirk: he speaks a different language, and we can’t understand what he’s saying for a large portion of the book. Normally, these instances are either translated by another character or outright in the book. That alone might not have been an issue for me, but I knew from a previous review that he speaks Norwegian. So from the moment he’s introduced, I had a translator ready. This meant that I was taken out of the story every time he speaks to translate his words. A distraction like that is huge for me, as I want to be immersed in the story and not taken out every other sentence to translate dialogue. It would have been better for me if I’d let the foreign language be and just gone without knowing what the character was saying.

Additionally, I thought the language barrier was solved too easily. The way it’s solved shows us several useful and important things about the story: character development for newly introduced characters, worldbuilding about the magic system, plot device for later in the story. But at that point in the narrative, the issue’s resolution doesn’t feel earned to me.

Regarding the worldbuilding: I love the idea of the fog and how it functions. Establishing not a physical enemy, but an uncontrollable and unbeatable outside force, creates a separate tension from the main storyline, which in turn raises the stakes since all decisions must be made with this force in mind. It adds a layer of tension to every choice, no matter how small.

It’s a world of sleeping gods and lurking dangers, where every decision must be made with care and any careless choice can lead to much larger consequences, as our main character discovers the hard way.

This book contains content warnings for minor blood, animal bones, child labor, death, forced captivity, kidnapping, parentification, serious injury, and violence. I recommend this book for YA fans of epic fantasy, dark mythology, and the found family trope. Anyone who loves getting lost in the woods, self-discovery, primordial monsters, or ancient lore will love this book.

Thank you to Aspen & Thorn Press for the advanced reader’s copy!