Reviews with content warning for Blood - Green Fuse Burning

Reviews tagging 'Blood'

Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris

6 reviews

bookishmillennial's review against another edition

dark emotional reflective sad tense fast-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

disclaimer: I don’t really give starred reviews. I hope my reviews provide enough information to let you know if a book is for you or not. Find me here: https://linktr.ee/bookishmillennial

Thank you to my bookstagrammer friends who influenced me to read this: @titalindascorner & @borrowedbyaudrey <3 I adore yall!

This was such a gorgeously written novella, and I genuinely wish it was longer (but it works perfectly as a novella!!!) Here are some examples of the writing:

The city, for all its sutures of concrete, let her be anonymous; hell, it encouraged facelessness, participation in community optional.

She’d brought the outside world’s deep greens into her body, accepted the infection of her mind. Now the canvas would surrender to her wounded hands.

Every time she mourned her father she also mourned the idea of a life that had him in it. And guilt compounded her remorse and confusion, the sense that she was grieving incorrectly in her mourning that seemed both selfish and impersonal. Tomorrow — and all the days after it — was something that had only ever lived in her imagination.

The verdant and the vermillion burst forth in tapestries of life and death, blood and blooming, the abstract strokes constituting vine and flower, all wrapping the monstrous woman from previous paintings in an exciting culmination: instead of being devoured by flames, she is at one with life and her surroundings — a wishful sentiment accentuated by the artist’s mysterious disappearance shortly after its creation.

The urge to confess to them was absurd, but her words erupted like new growth rooted in testimony. If this was the last thing she would ever do on this earth, why shouldn’t she give them, these hallucinations or ephemeral monsters, her feelings about what it had meant for her to live? Maybe this was what they wanted from her. “Life was like a language I couldn’t speak.” </spoiler

Like, absolutely stunning writing. I was in awe as I read this, and can't wait to read more from Tiffany Morris.

This novella is about Rita, who in the midst of her grief, is accepted to a week-long artists residency after her girlfriend Molly submitted an application on her behalf. Though Rita is rightfully pissed off at the paranoid idea that Molly is trying to simply get rid of her and have some space from her, she goes to the cabin, which coincidentally is where her estranged late father grew up. Rita begins seeing and hearing things at the cabin, especially near the swamp, and must confront her deepest fears about mortality, her relationships, and her future.

Though I have not lost a parent, I felt completely immersed in Rita's grief, anger, and fear. TM's writing imbued Rita with such fervor, anxiety, and pain that felt almost tangible! Like you could reach into the book, touch it, and pull it out. It was atmospheric, eerie, and forced you to ruminate on these things alongside Rita. I read this in one sitting, and I highly recommend it!

Author info: Tiffany Morris is a Mi’kmaw/settler writer of speculative fiction and poetry from Kjipuktuk (Halifax), Nova Scotia.

(more) quotations that stood out to me:

The Mi’kmaw language always sounded weird coming from her mother, even though her mother was half Mi’kmaw. She had been estranged from that side of her family for years and wouldn’t tell Rita why, wouldn’t share any knowledge with her other than a few words or phrases. She was much more into telling Rita how she should behave and what convoluted beauty rituals could improve her appearance.

I am not indigenous, I am Filipino & Chinese, but I could so deeply relate to this quotation, as I am not fluent in any of my parents' native languages, yet the sharing of cultural knowledge that was inherently sexist and misogynistic hits so close to home.

“To accept death is to accept your own nothingness — not the act of dying in itself, but the fact that death resides in you, the fact that you will, eventually, be dead. To be in this state of perpetual otherwise. Accepting death is the understanding that consciousness is the shell of experience, not its inner sanctum — and death becomes a pilgrimage outside the golden cage of our material existence. I don’t mean this as an encouragement of death, rather a call to understand that you, too, are nature, and nature loves above all else transmutation, and impermanence, and creation. We do not protect life by denying death’s existence, yet our capitalist and colonialist structures are based on this denial. We do not protect anything through denial.”

Grief formed her new reality, her new understanding of time, an invading force that occupied land and bodies in equal measure. Her memories were colonized by trauma.

It had taken me over a year to realize that I suffered from PTSD and wasn’t bad at grief — mass culture is just that deeply avoidant about both death and trauma... Everywhere you turn in a capitalist society there are sweet and numbing routes to escapism, clichés about love, products determined to sanitize and smother in nostalgia every disorienting and uncomfortable part of the human experience. (author's note/acknowledgements)

Content Warnings

archaicrobin's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

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

5.0

A beautifully written literary horror novella tackling grief, depression, and trauma through the tale of an indigenous artist’s haunting experience at a secluded cabin near a large pond near her recently deceased father’s former land.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started this one but was pleasantly surprised by the depth of this novella. If you’re looking for a literary horror novella with eerie imagery and psychological horror elements blended with creatures and malevolent nature then you’ll love this one!

Content Warnings

obscurepages's review

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dark emotional mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

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

4.0

"Life was a like a language I couldn't speak."

Wow. I dove into this book not knowing much other than it's an Indigenous horror novella. What I got now is a brilliant character study of a woman struggling with her mental health, insecurities, Indigenous identity, her drive to create art, and her reconciling nature with life and death.

I have to say, the imagery and the prose in this book is something else. Something entirely its own.

Overall, this was an incredible mix of both unsettling and profound.

Content Warnings

luckylulureads's review

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challenging dark reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

Content Warnings

sproutedpages's review

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dark emotional mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

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

4.0

Thank you to NetGalley, Stelliform Press, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and author Tiffany Morris for providing me with an advanced digital copy of this novella for review.

Content Warnings

atlastheninth's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

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

3.75

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy in exchange for an honest review.

CW: Suicidal ideation, parental death, animal death, gore, blood

Synopsis: After Rita won an artist residency, she decides to spent a week in an isolated cabin in the woods, hoping for inspiration for her artworks. During her first night there she hears strange noises coming from the pond close by. And the things she sees and hears, all seemingly connected to the pond, only become stranger in the following days.

Thoughts:

This book is very atmospheric and uses very poetic language. I would describe it as artistic, which fits very well to the story and to our MC Rita, who is an artist. She is a great main character with lots of flaws, but still so very lovable/relatable.

Each chapter starts with the description of one of Ritas' paintings that she draws on her retreat, and for rest of the chapter we follow the events that inspired said painting, which I found really interesting.

There are a lot of flashbacks from Ritas' life, explaining how she got to this point in her life, explaining why she feels the way she feels. Later in the book, these did feel neither out of place nor confusing, but at the beginning they did. It seemed unorganized and took away from that first feeling of wrongness when Rita hears noises during the first night. Together with the many descriptions and the author spelling out things, that you can already understand from those descriptions, the beginning was all over the place.

Here it may have been good to go sort the flashbacks better and to expand on the happenings in the first night.

However, once we get over this, when it became more horrorish, it got a lot better. It felt more focused.

This is a book about grief: grief over her dead father, over the declining relationship with her girlfriend, over her barely existent relationship with the rest of her family, over not being connected to her culture as much as she wants to be.

"She'd become alien in her own body, alien in the landscape she and her ancestors had called home, transformed into some unearthly being."

Rita feels disconnected from life, has been doing so since a while and during her time in the cabin, for the first time, she admits it to herself.

"She could do it. She could die here."

We watch her accept this, embrace this and wanting her life to change; to be reborn, no matter how.

"She was ready to be remade in the waters, to meet herself in the sludge of unbecoming."

This transition was written very well, how it was shown through her hallucinations of dead rabbits and a burning woman.

(There was also grief over the destruction/loss of nature because of climate change, however that part felt a bit out of place, like it was just put in there, to be there. It didn't really do anything for the story.)

The horrorish parts were right up my alley. They were not really scary, but just really unsettling and also written so beautifully and poetic.

Content Warnings

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