Burning

10:00 am 25 June 2016

The buzz surrounding Burning suggests it’s a cross between Orange is the New Black: Juvie Style and Firestarter, and there are elements of both of these to be sure, what with the girl who is connected to fire-related events, and all the inmate stories.

But, unfortunately, the story delivered doesn’t quite match up to what is promised in the blurb:

- For starters, the blurb begins with the line “After three years in juvie, Angela Davis is now months away from release” while the Angela of the book has been in juvie for just eighteen months.

- Angela was super gullible/ignorant and had to see things many many times and then have them spelled out for her by another character before she “worked out” what was going on. While the reader was able to figure it out by the second mention, if not the first.

- In terms of pacing, though Jessica arrived at the facility on page eleven, and though some events happened in between that hinted at a little something creepy, nothing really began to escalate until almost two thirds of the way through the story.

- At some point it stopped feeling like a prison story, and started feeling like a story set in a kind’ve strict boarding-school for only-a-little-bit-difficult girls.

- It wasn’t scary. Not even a little bit.

The girls in this prison had no street smarts, they didn’t look suspiciously at a situation that was too good to be true, and pretty much every single one of them fell easily into a cult-like study group. With the exception of a couple of fights or arguments, there was really nothing here to suggest that many of these girls grew up on the rough side of town or committed terrible crimes to end up here, though it is stated that they did.

The rest of this review can be found HERE!

Figgy O'Connell

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Burning