Reviews with content warning for Death of parent - The Ones We Burn

So, you're probably reading the reviews because of the controversy. I didn't know about the controversy prior to reading the book, but heard about it right as I started reading so I read it with that knowledge.

The controversies:

1) The book is racist because the POC twins are ruling the country with an iron tyrannical fist killing loads of white people and oppressing them.
2) The book is antisemetic because it's got blood libel in it due to "blood-witches"

I genuenly saw neither of those throughout the book. The twins don't even rule, they're children who where scared of their white father who murdered loads of people and was really tyrannical. Here's a quote describing the father:

What had Galen thought of his father in those moments? Had he watched his father's pale hands call down storms and prayed his own would never do the same?

And the answer is yes, Galen was and still is terrified of his father. He does not want to be him in any manner. His sister, Aramis, is a self-taught medical scientist who's been working incredibly hard (off-page, before the start of the book and throughout it) to save lives, make a cure to the disease and help treat blood-witches, aka literally just wanting to progress science to benefit all.

How the fuck are these 2 tyrannical rulers oppressing all the white people. Genuenly. I am genuenly asking anyone who really believes in the outrage to explain it to me because I'm so confused.

About the blood libel, I just heard people go like "oh and I just heard it's also antisemetic" but like ???? Blood witches do not use blood for magic, it's literally just "period powers". Blood witch's magic is in their blood and just flares up when their period starts. It just makes them go murdery and out of control and super strong, absolutely nothing about using blood for anything.
Again, if I'm missing something please do enlighten me.

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Now that part is out of the way. As you can see by my star rating and the fact it's not on my reccommendations tags, this wasn't the best book I've ever read. It's got a lot of problems with it. It's incredibly predictable - like from the way the characters are introduced and the first events are set up, you can predict all the twists at the end. The characters feel incredibly scripted and their emotions feel forced. Character's arcs and progressions get reset within a couple sentences just for shock and twists and plot progression which just feels so stupid and confusing and just fustrating.

There's not many characters - some see that as a negative but so many books nowadays have insane amounts of characters and I've got an awful memory so it was quite nice for me - but you'd think that would make the emotional beats be much more impactful. But honestly, the majority of the emotional beats where kinda just lost on me as so much was told to you, the characters don't feel like they're alive and their own people. And so many of the side characters are only on the page for like, a couple chapters.

Mix's writing style was certainly something to read. Everything felt like it was written in present tense but when I was around 10% in I realised it was actually in past tense which completely threw me for the rest of the book. Additionally, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, the characters don't really talk, it's sort of written like it's in first-person but at the same time there's this authors voice dictating everything and telling us about things which feels really disconnected from the characters. Most important things happen off-page as well then it's just info-dumped to us randomly when it's needed - all the history and information about the disease, ranka's history and even connections to people, even the romance is all pretty much off-page.

The journey to the city is a good show of that. We see her set off on the journey, then we see her arrive. Apparently during the journey a lot of incredibly important things happen but we're just told them later when needed. Why not use the page space telling us used to instead just show us the journey.

The way dialogue was written as well... This is more a personal issue I have with this style of writing but it also did clash quite badly with how some of the characters were portrayed and did undermine some scenes. It tries to be this quirky funny dialogue sometimes. Sometimes characters are just super awkward and dumb and bashful when 2 seconds prior they where battle-hardened, focused on the task and super serious, sometimes a character would crack jokes to someone they hate as they're being beaten and tortured and it's just a bit weird. It feels very forced in for comedic relief and really does not feel natural in any sense of the word.

Some other random issues I have with the book is despite so much being overexplained, so much just wasn't? Like I still don't understand how Bloodwinn's are chosen, I don't understand what types of witches there really are, I still don't understand the motives of basically every antagonist, and a lot more. Additionally, why in gods name does everyone just bite each other in fights. Y'all have swords and axes and shit why does everyone just resort to biting. At the end of every fight scene is a lot of bite wounds. Synonyms also apparently don't exist, the word "pale" is used to describe every white person and I did count it, it's used 66 times total. Sometimes multiple times over a couple pages.

Pacing was another slight issue. The book covers - mostly - just over a month's worth of time but somehow within that it seems like multiple years worth of action and progression happens. Does no one sleep in this world? Do they really just literally hop from one action to another? How is it that we're still only really told about things that happen instead of seeing them if the length of time is so short but this book is so long?

I did quite like the premise - but the premise does kinda just spoil way too much. The execution was a let down in basically every single way. I did really love a medical scientist though like Aramis in such a high-fantasy book, I did quite like what little time we had when she was experimenting or healing. At the end as well, the concept of

therapy

is also told to us (again, the experience is not shown to us..) which was super interesting to see in a high-fantasy book. I don't actually really recall even a general fantasy book that's approached the topic before. But it was only a couple sentences long and yeah.. only just told to us.

So yeah, I don't really think this warrented all the sheer hatred and vitriol against it personally but it's certainly not a 5* read. If you want to read a book that's got a similar romance structure to this (royal siblings supposed to be in arranged marrages but actually just gay) please read Gwen and Art are Not In Love - but that book is not a high fantasy it's just an incredibly good semi-romcom with one hell of a genre twist.

Content Warnings

kodiex's review

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adventurous dark emotional sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

kirstenf's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

kitrook's review against another edition

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adventurous dark tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I liked this one. It took me a while to get into, but once it got going I felt immensely hooked. Couldn’t put it down.

As for the reverse racism fantasy, a wonderful review by a Black individual is here, I suggest anyone looking to read the book reads it if they are worried about controversy https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4812626829

What Black people have to say about this book is important, whether or not they like it, but it is also important to debunk some of the false information spread about his book. The above review clarifies that.

This book was an interesting analysis of power in many ways; of class relations, of blaming the wrong people for your oppression, but majorly: people taking on massive burdens to fight for their freedom. It begs the age old question, is there ever a wrong way to fight for freedom? For resistance? As the review I have linked to pointed out, both sides made very questionable moves but only ever in the name of protecting their people.

Content Warnings

frantically's review against another edition

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This book just didn't bring anything special to the table. We've read about witches, we've read about getting engaged to the prince and falling for his sister again, we've read about royals realizing their privilege and how they, too, have been exploited. We've read about

mentors who had to take parental roles dying

and

both sides showing their villainous traits

. This could've been redeemed with giving us something interesting to make the story stand out, be that beautiful writing or great characterisation but in the end, this will just end up in the trenches of stereotypical YA novels.

Content Warnings