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A review by jennieartemis
The Ones We Burn by Rebecca Mix
adventurous
dark
tense
medium-paced
3.0
TL;DR: What should have been a powerful tale of trauma has been massively derailed by a poor attempt to integrate ideas of racial discrimination with unpleasant repercussions
(eARC provided by Netgalley)
Had things been a bit different, I would doubtless be calling the Ones We Burn a straightforward, promising YA fantasy, but unfortunately it has fallen into a classic trap and paid the consequences. Using fantasy to explore discrimination is a common thing, and obviously admirable, but it needs to be set up and framed very carefully or it just backfires, as has happened here (prompting very warranted criticism and upset from readers). When people say this is a "reverse racism" book, it doesn't mean it literally is about non-white people oppressing white people (that's not how the world in the book is set up): it's a little more complicated and layered than that, but still absolutely valid as a complaint. What we have is a completely fictional racial dynamic (humans oppressing witches), in which our representative victim is white, and our representative oppressors are a pair of Black royal siblings. The fact that other characters are of various races sort of doesn't matter, because the book foregrounds this dynamic, and so I'm not surprised readers feel this is an excuse (intentional or not) to reverse real-world power dynamics. But there is another layer which adds on to this: we actually are supposed to side with the Black characters, but they are coded as monarchs in a very white Western Europe way - many of the enemies actually end up being marginalised figures. So on this other layer, we are actually being positioned into supporting an inherently white imperial structure through the fact that we are expected to be progressive and support characters we recognise as marginalised in the real world. Complicated, and quite possibly unintentional, but this is exactly what needs to be caught in publishing. And I think it trickles out to affect the rest of the book to be honest: treating the human-witch split as a racial/cultural thing rather than as something akin to queerness or disability (which feels a more natural fit) creates a world that I can't quite understand - it leaves me with more questions about how this world even functions on these lines. That's a real shame, because there is a genuinely powerful story about trauma and gaslighting in here (and a sweet enough romance), that really should have been the focus. Trying to also tackle racial dynamics, even in a fantastical version, has sadly brought down a book that otherwise had a lot of potential.
4/10 in personal rating system
(eARC provided by Netgalley)
Had things been a bit different, I would doubtless be calling the Ones We Burn a straightforward, promising YA fantasy, but unfortunately it has fallen into a classic trap and paid the consequences. Using fantasy to explore discrimination is a common thing, and obviously admirable, but it needs to be set up and framed very carefully or it just backfires, as has happened here (prompting very warranted criticism and upset from readers). When people say this is a "reverse racism" book, it doesn't mean it literally is about non-white people oppressing white people (that's not how the world in the book is set up): it's a little more complicated and layered than that, but still absolutely valid as a complaint. What we have is a completely fictional racial dynamic (humans oppressing witches), in which our representative victim is white, and our representative oppressors are a pair of Black royal siblings. The fact that other characters are of various races sort of doesn't matter, because the book foregrounds this dynamic, and so I'm not surprised readers feel this is an excuse (intentional or not) to reverse real-world power dynamics. But there is another layer which adds on to this: we actually are supposed to side with the Black characters, but they are coded as monarchs in a very white Western Europe way - many of the enemies actually end up being marginalised figures. So on this other layer, we are actually being positioned into supporting an inherently white imperial structure through the fact that we are expected to be progressive and support characters we recognise as marginalised in the real world. Complicated, and quite possibly unintentional, but this is exactly what needs to be caught in publishing. And I think it trickles out to affect the rest of the book to be honest: treating the human-witch split as a racial/cultural thing rather than as something akin to queerness or disability (which feels a more natural fit) creates a world that I can't quite understand - it leaves me with more questions about how this world even functions on these lines. That's a real shame, because there is a genuinely powerful story about trauma and gaslighting in here (and a sweet enough romance), that really should have been the focus. Trying to also tackle racial dynamics, even in a fantastical version, has sadly brought down a book that otherwise had a lot of potential.
4/10 in personal rating system