Scan barcode
A review by laelyn
The Ones We Burn: an unmissable dark epic young adult fantasy by Rebecca Mix
1.0
There is a common theme in my reading experiences lately regarding books that are super popular on booktok written by authors that are more-or-less popular social media personas. That common theme is that they disappoint me, and sadly, "The Ones We Burn" is not an outlier here.
I now know there is a lot of discourse surrounding this book and certain elements in its narrative, but I didn't know about that before I finished it and I don't feel qualified to comment on it, so I encourage everyone to read up on these issues in reviews by poc readers.
Even apart from any such issues, this book is just. Not good. It tells the story of Ranka, a blood witch (which is apparently the most powerful kind of witch, though I couldn't tell you what other kinds of witches there are) who is supposed to marry an evil human prince in order to uphold a peace treaty. After refusing at first, she later accepts to pretend to agree in order to get close enough to the prince to kill him, possibly leading to war among the humans. Obviously, she changes her mind about the killing later on because these evil royals are not as evil as she thought.
All of this is told in such an incredibly heavy-handed and over-narrated way that at no point at all was I emotionally engaged or even just interested in what was going on. Everything is narrated in a rather bland, distanced narrative voice, nothing ever comes alive. The characters are not allowed to speak and to be heard by the readers, they remain written words on a page until the end. We are told that Ranka has these important relationships with people but they are never felt, they never exist beyond the narration. The romance suffers from it as well, as it is just told to us instead of developing organically between Ranka and the princess, Aramis, instead of being shown in their interaction.
Scenes that should be emotional are just boring because all of it is tell-don't-show. "Twists" are incredibly obvious because the narration is so heavy-handed (a character later to be revealed as a Bad Guy looks "like he has secrets" in a conversation with Ranka where he does very suspicious things, just to name one example). Nothing in this book ever surprised me because it was so clear where everything was headed at any time. Basically the first time Ranka meets the prince she is supposed to kill, the prince she is convinced is an evil despot who kidnapped her friend and kind-of-surrogate-sister, we are told how kind and sweet and gentle and absolutely not evil he is. Ranka does not discover this for herself throughout the story, we are simply told it is so, completely taking away any excitement and mystery of the kill-the-prince-storyline. No wonder I forgot that was even a thing halfway through the book. This is just one example of plot points that are rendered completely void by the narration, and of that there are many. Things that should mean something are simply irrelevant and insignificant, like Ranka's past with her sister or her relationship with her aforementioned surrogate sister and so on and so forth. None of it really means anything, and so none of it made me care.
I'm frankly very surprised this gets published as-is and I wonder if any editor ever seriously looked at it. It's a badly constructed story that fails to engage its readers in any way, it's overnarrated and badly paced, and it's a shame because there are some ideas in the book that I actually found kind of cool. I liked the general idea about witches, I liked Percy's dragon-like powers though they were never really explored. There are bits and pieces that have potential, but the execution is very weak. I barely made it through the book and almost dnf'd it many times. Maybe with some better editing and improved writing this could become an okay story, but as it is, it's sadly a 1 star read for me.
Many thanks to Hodder & Stoughton and Netgalley for the arc
I now know there is a lot of discourse surrounding this book and certain elements in its narrative, but I didn't know about that before I finished it and I don't feel qualified to comment on it, so I encourage everyone to read up on these issues in reviews by poc readers.
Even apart from any such issues, this book is just. Not good. It tells the story of Ranka, a blood witch (which is apparently the most powerful kind of witch, though I couldn't tell you what other kinds of witches there are) who is supposed to marry an evil human prince in order to uphold a peace treaty. After refusing at first, she later accepts to pretend to agree in order to get close enough to the prince to kill him, possibly leading to war among the humans. Obviously, she changes her mind about the killing later on because these evil royals are not as evil as she thought.
All of this is told in such an incredibly heavy-handed and over-narrated way that at no point at all was I emotionally engaged or even just interested in what was going on. Everything is narrated in a rather bland, distanced narrative voice, nothing ever comes alive. The characters are not allowed to speak and to be heard by the readers, they remain written words on a page until the end. We are told that Ranka has these important relationships with people but they are never felt, they never exist beyond the narration. The romance suffers from it as well, as it is just told to us instead of developing organically between Ranka and the princess, Aramis, instead of being shown in their interaction.
Scenes that should be emotional are just boring because all of it is tell-don't-show. "Twists" are incredibly obvious because the narration is so heavy-handed (a character later to be revealed as a Bad Guy looks "like he has secrets" in a conversation with Ranka where he does very suspicious things, just to name one example). Nothing in this book ever surprised me because it was so clear where everything was headed at any time. Basically the first time Ranka meets the prince she is supposed to kill, the prince she is convinced is an evil despot who kidnapped her friend and kind-of-surrogate-sister, we are told how kind and sweet and gentle and absolutely not evil he is. Ranka does not discover this for herself throughout the story, we are simply told it is so, completely taking away any excitement and mystery of the kill-the-prince-storyline. No wonder I forgot that was even a thing halfway through the book. This is just one example of plot points that are rendered completely void by the narration, and of that there are many. Things that should mean something are simply irrelevant and insignificant, like Ranka's past with her sister or her relationship with her aforementioned surrogate sister and so on and so forth. None of it really means anything, and so none of it made me care.
I'm frankly very surprised this gets published as-is and I wonder if any editor ever seriously looked at it. It's a badly constructed story that fails to engage its readers in any way, it's overnarrated and badly paced, and it's a shame because there are some ideas in the book that I actually found kind of cool. I liked the general idea about witches, I liked Percy's dragon-like powers though they were never really explored. There are bits and pieces that have potential, but the execution is very weak. I barely made it through the book and almost dnf'd it many times. Maybe with some better editing and improved writing this could become an okay story, but as it is, it's sadly a 1 star read for me.
Many thanks to Hodder & Stoughton and Netgalley for the arc