A review by atlastheninth
Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris

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. 
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