From the Bookshelf of ⋆.ೃ࿔࿐ྂfaith & fantasy⋆.ೃ࿔࿐ྂ…

Calor (The Nightingale Trilogy, #1)

J.J. Fischer

Start date: December 1, 2024

Finish date: December 31, 2024

Discussion: ✯Book of the Month✯

Why we're reading this: ❄ December 2024 BOTM! Last one, whooo! ❄
[close] ❄ December 2024 BOTM! Last one, whooo! ❄

Find A Copy At

Group Discussions About This Book

Showing 2 of 145 topics — 4,678 comments total

✯Book of the Month✯

* ⭒September 2025 BotM - The Mermaid’s Tale [General Discussion]⭒
By ✨ tazannah - … , ⭒spiritual leader⭒ · 21 posts · 26 views

last updated Sep 09, 2025 04:46PM

* ⭒September 2025 BotM - The Mermaid’s Tale [Questions]⭒
By ✨ tazannah - … , ⭒spiritual leader⭒ · 1 post · 8 views

last updated Sep 02, 2025 03:32PM

showing 4 of 4 topics view all »

What Members Thought

Dec 06, 2024 Sharon Loves to Read rated it it was amazing

Shelves: eye-and-ear-read, fantasy-ya, clean_g_pg, christian-fantasy, favorites, group-read

4.5⭐ rounded up. [On reread, it’s a full 5⭐️ read for me!]

While this story has somber vibes, it did not feel "dark" to me, but rather poignant. I loved the writing, the plot, and characters. The author explores painful issues of the heart, and she does a wonderful job of it. The characters' interactions, especially when Cass was involved, were great. While a bit dark himself, he had a way of lightening the mood.

I wish the author had been more descriptive of what made Sephone such a powerful mem. ...more

19 likes · Like · see review

Dec 06, 2022 E.F. Buckles rated it really liked it

Shelves: made-me-smile, fantasy, adult-fiction, enclave, arc-copy, post-apocalyptic

Full disclosure, I'm on Enclave Publishing's street team and received an advanced reader copy of this book as a reward for participating, but I was not required to read the book, much less write a review. The following review is my honest opinion.

I can count the number of post-apocalyptic books I've read on one hand, so when I realized that's what Calor by J.J. Fischer was, I was curious to find out what I though of it.

This story takes inspiration from Han's Christian Anderson's fairytale "The ...more

18 likes · Like · see review

Mar 23, 2024 Brittany rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy, christian-fiction, clean-reads, year-2024, dystopian, 4-star-reads

4 Stars ✨

Clean Fantasy

What if you could edit memories with a single touch?

Taking place 60 years after the apocalypse, the world is not what it once was. After different cataclysmic events, people would do anything for just a glimpse of the old. High valued memories are traded and nostalgia is worth dying and for some, killing for.

Sephone, orphaned and owned as a slave - has a gift, she’s a mem which means she can see and extract memories from other people’s minds. She’s highly sought after an ...more

5 likes · Like · see review

May 21, 2025 Celeste rated it it was amazing

Shelves: christian, fantasy, enclave

Calor is the first installment in the Nightingale saga, a completed epic fantasy trilogy followed by a standalone sequel. The entire series is inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s beloved short story, “The Nightingale,” and also includes notes of the Hades and Persephone myth. I was enraptured by Calor from the very beginning. The worldbuilding is fascinating, the characters are compelling and sympathetic, the writing is lovely and incredibly engaging, and the pacing never falters.

In this worl Calor is the first installment in the Nightingale saga, a completed epic fantasy trilogy followed by a standalone sequel. The entire series is inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s beloved short story, “The Nightingale,” and also includes notes of the Hades and Persephone myth. I was enraptured by Calor from the very beginning. The worldbuilding is fascinating, the characters are compelling and sympathetic, the writing is lovely and incredibly engaging, and the pacing never falters.

In this world, the largest form of currency are memories, which can be extracted for a price and sold in vials to the wealthy, whose gluttonous consumption of these memories allow them to ignore the broken world around them and live inside gilded recollections of happier times. Lovely memories are extracted, and dark memories muted, but mems, a type of alter who can access the memories of others. Alters are individuals born with supernatural gifts. Mems are but one type of alter among many. Some can heal, or inspire courage, or distinguish truth from falsehood. Then there are darker alters, those who use their gifts for harm.

Calor touches on some deep, heartfelt themes. We are shown the horrors of living with deep, unrelenting grief, and we see that contrasted with fervent hope, held even in the darkest of times. Through both their gifts and their blossoming friendships, the characters beautifully demonstrate the importance of allowing others to help bear your burdens, and how insisting on shouldering that load alone is in actuality a selfish decision, not a selfless one. We also see how you can’t divorce joy from sorrow; both your highest highs and your lowest lows are a part of your story, which falls apart when you try to extract the pain from it.

I immediately fell for the characters. Sephone is a powerful mem. She has been a slave for as long as she can remember, and recalls nothing of her parents or the first four years of her life. Dorian is a respected thane who has fallen from power. He’s good and noble down to his bones, but the traumatic loss of his family has left him so broken that he sees no point in even trying to reassemble the shattered pieces. And then there’s the secondary cast. Cass, a lumen who can’t control his powers of visible truth detection, unless he’s drunk and chasing a skirt. Bas and Bear, Dorian’s trusted bodyguards. And of course Jewel, a snow-white wolf with the understanding of a human. I adore well-crafted animal companions, and she’s among the best I’ve read.

There is a faith component to Calor, but it’s light. I have hope that faith is one of the components that will be delved into more deeply as the series progresses. The same could be said for the romance. There is yearning, though it’s mostly one-sided. I’m not sure if there will be development on that front, but the possibility exists. Fischer left herself so many elements to explore, so many questions to answer and so much room for her characters to grow. I’m excited to see what happens next.

There is not a single element of this story that I did not love. I was blown away by Fischer’s craftsmanship. While this is the first of her books that I’ve read, she has the talent and the writing chops to stand alongside Sanderson and Gwynne, Lynch and Lawrence and the host of other mainstream fantasy authors I’ve read and loved through the years. The world was fleshed out enough to be completely engaging and believable while still leaving so much room for interesting exploration in the next installments. And the characters stole my heart. I can’t wait to watch them grown through the rest of the series. There is a cliffhanger here, but as the trilogy and even the standalone sequel are complete and out in the world, that’s not something I want to complain about. Instead, it compels me to pick up the second book, Lumen, immediately. I’m not much of a binge reader, but I will absolutely be binging my way through every Nightingale book. ...more

2 likes · Like · see review

Oct 03, 2023 Kevin King rated it it was ok

Review summary:

Calor is set in a post-apocalyptic world that doesn’t feel post-apocalyptic. The characters are fine. The magic system is unique and interesting. The plot follow the trope ‘diverse group of characters set out on a quest to find a magic object that will solve all their problems.’ The writing is not bad, although it could have been tightened up a bit. The world-building leaves quite a lot to be desired. The world feels like a cardboard cut-out covered with an amateur paint job depic Review summary:

Calor is set in a post-apocalyptic world that doesn’t feel post-apocalyptic. The characters are fine. The magic system is unique and interesting. The plot follow the trope ‘diverse group of characters set out on a quest to find a magic object that will solve all their problems.’ The writing is not bad, although it could have been tightened up a bit. The world-building leaves quite a lot to be desired. The world feels like a cardboard cut-out covered with an amateur paint job depicting a crude outline of a world. Most of the prose is dedicated to exploring the feelings of the characters, and their interactions with each other – and that part is entertaining, at least. But not enough to overcome the sketchy world building.

Extended details:

The magic system: a side effect of the apocalypse caused random people to develop magical abilities, and also marked them with iridescent hair. It takes a while to figure out the range of abilities that people might have, but at the beginning it appears to be related to suppressing and enhancing either memories (mems) or specific emotions (alters.) Also, a few people can reveal whether others are telling the truth or not (lumens.) They keep saying people hate them, but nobody they interact with ever does.

The economy: a huge part of the economy seems to center around the buying and selling of memories, extracted by mems and stored as potions that anyone can drink and experience the memory. No idea what they use for money. There is a barter scene that literal says “The merchant named a sum. Dorian named a counter-sum.” That’s as much as we ever get about money. Two times it is mentioned that all the food is fermented or moldy, but we never learn why that is or whether that’s only the poor people or whether the rich eat moldy food too. It never has any real impact on the story, as the characters always have enough food (including but not limited to ham.) So it kind of seems like there’s meant to be a food shortage, but there never seems to be an actual food shortage, even for the many horses in the story. Maybe the environment supposedly makes growing food harder? I don’t know. It's never explored.

The environment: the main thing that makes the world somewhat ‘post-apocalyptic’ is that something happened at the end of a big war that took place (see history section next.) The thing that happened is called “the gray” and apparently blocks the sun. At the beginning you’re led to believe that nobody ever sees the sun any more, but later you learn that people in other parts of the world see the sun regularly. The Gray isn’t described at all until half way through the book, and even then only sparsely. It seems to be some kind of permanent fog that thins as you reach higher elevations. And randomly there are ‘magic storms’ with rainbow lightning that tries to hit magic users. Otherwise the gray doesn't seem to impact the story at all. It's just a vague backdrop.

The history/pacing: Early on you learn there was a war, and at the end of the war the gray happened and people got magic. There was a ‘world-that-was’ that no longer exists and lots of ‘relics.’ Information is given out in scraps and crumbs, almost always too little too late. Then new stuff appears out of nothing in the last 20% of the book. The Main Male Character’s magic ability is kept secret, even though he has POV scenes where he uses it, until more than half way through the story. The reason given is that he’s worried the girl will be put off by it somehow. But the reveal feels anti-climactic. The magic doesn’t feel very significant, and the girl doesn’t react to the revelation at all. Also, at 93% of the way through the book, suddenly we learn some people can call magic fireballs from the sky. The characters knew this, but the reader didn’t until it suddenly happens (without effecting the plot at all.) It’s at 78% of the way through the book that we learn "the war" was fought between the two main current nations, only sixty years ago. We never learn why it began or how it ended, and “nobody knows” where the gray came from. But nobody ever talks about it or tries to do anything about it. The “world-that-was” was abandoned an unknown amount of time ago because of bad weather or something, and even though an entire nation is “dedicated to remembering it,” nobody seems to know anything about it and none of them ever talk about it. They just buy the memory of strawberries and cinnamon. Using the name of the world that was is apparently “forbidden” by somebody, for no known reason. The special magic relic the characters are searching for, which was “already ancient in the ‘world that was’”, supposedly has “multiple powers” that include enhancing the magic that didn’t appear until just sixty years ago. Near the end of the book, when someone suddenly suffers from an “unknown poison” for no reason at all, we suddenly learn that the relic also has healing powers. Because, reasons.

Nothing in this world makes any sense at all. There’s no foreshadowing, new stuff just appears when it’s convenient for the plot. The characters are kind of interesting, but the fogginess of the world was so painful to get through that I have no desire to explore it further.
...more

1 like · Like · see review

Jan 12, 2023 Crystal rated it really liked it

Shelves: audible-books

Loved the imagination of this book - people gifted or maybe cursed, depending upon their perspective, with abilities that could be used for good or evil and how these abilities impact their lives. Add intrigue, power grabs, and kidnapping and there's nonstop action! My only disappointment is that I have to wait for the next two installments of this trilogy. ...more

1 like · Like · see review