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crofteereader 's review for:
Burn Our Bodies Down
by Rory Power
Not as comfortable in its own skin as Wilder Girls, but still more polished. The writing in Burn Our Bodies Down is reaching out to shake your hand with the right hand while pressing a knife between your ribs with the left. There's so much more teeming, unseen beneath the surface. While not as descriptive (read: gory) as Wilder Girls, Burn Our Bodies Down wraps the reader in the most toxic family I've ever seen. Daughter and mother and grandmother masters of manipulation in different forms: daughter explosive and emotional, mother jagged and unpredictable, grandmother remote and cold. The dialogue was like watching a series of duels between professional swordswomen with vastly different schools of training.
The surface-level plot was a bit dull. You don't really get a payoff on the big mystery (at least not in a way that really clicks) until around 85% in. It's just a lot of layers of cenversation between the three generations of Nielsen women and all the sharp hooks they toss between them. But there are a lot of really interesting interactions with outside characters, seen in a way that only someone like Margot could see. Her fascination with Tess (beyond just an initial spark of attraction) kept coming back and kept being relevant in a big way.
Despite being able to guess the answer well in advance, I still found myself surprised and intrigued on that journey. And when we did get to the gore and the weird stuff that was so beautifully present in Wilder Girls, Power absolutely did not disappoint.
{Thank you Delacorte Press, Random House Children's, and NetGalley for the advanced copy of this book}
The surface-level plot was a bit dull. You don't really get a payoff on the big mystery (at least not in a way that really clicks) until around 85% in. It's just a lot of layers of cenversation between the three generations of Nielsen women and all the sharp hooks they toss between them. But there are a lot of really interesting interactions with outside characters, seen in a way that only someone like Margot could see. Her fascination with Tess (beyond just an initial spark of attraction) kept coming back and kept being relevant in a big way.
Despite being able to guess the answer well in advance, I still found myself surprised and intrigued on that journey. And when we did get to the gore and the weird stuff that was so beautifully present in Wilder Girls, Power absolutely did not disappoint.
{Thank you Delacorte Press, Random House Children's, and NetGalley for the advanced copy of this book}