If Monty Python’s peasant is right, and watery tarts throwing swords at you is hardly a good way to decide who’s in charge, what about electing leaders based on who creates the best fire? In Torch, the final book in R. J. Anderson’s Flight and Flame Trilogy series, half-piskey Ivy faces her greatest crisis. In the piskeys’ home tunnels, leaders seem to embrace tyrannical madness. Ivy’s few allies are weak, wavering, and maybe worst of all, conniving. Throw in familial conflicts and romantic tensions, and Ivy’s plate is quite full even before she learns that enemies whom the piskeys thought long dead may not be so dead after all. Torch blazes a solid conclusion to the series’ themes of just leadership and racial reconciliation among fairy folk.

Best for: Young adult and adults.

Discern: Some battles and fighting with injuries and deaths.