A review by astralatlas
The Ones We Burn by Rebecca Mix

adventurous dark hopeful sad 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? It's complicated

2.5

I really wanted to like this book, but it never really hooked me. It got incredibly repetitive after a while and it was tough to get to the ending, which I didn’t find satisfying. Lots of loose ends were tied up, but the payoff wasn’t as big as I had hoped. This book is also LONG. I was committed to finishing, so I did, but it could have trimmed a lot of extraneous and repetitive description. 

This book was also advertised to me on the author’s instagram account as inspired by characters from Avatar the Last Airbender, a show I LOVE. I usually don’t have issues with books taking character inspiration from other media. However, I found the similarities and references in this book to be too obvious and rampant in part one, only to disappear completely by part 2. The author never found the sweet spot of integrating inspiration  and original work.