A review by bookishmillennial
Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris

dark emotional reflective sad tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
disclaimer: I don’t really give starred reviews. I hope my reviews provide enough information to let you know if a book is for you or not. Find me here: https://linktr.ee/bookishmillennial

Thank you to my bookstagrammer friends who influenced me to read this: @titalindascorner & @borrowedbyaudrey <3 I adore yall!

This was such a gorgeously written novella, and I genuinely wish it was longer (but it works perfectly as a novella!!!) Here are some examples of the writing:
 The city, for all its sutures of concrete, let her be anonymous; hell, it encouraged facelessness, participation in community optional. 

 She’d brought the outside world’s deep greens into her body, accepted the infection of her mind. Now the canvas would surrender to her wounded hands. 

 Every time she mourned her father she also mourned the idea of a life that had him in it. And guilt compounded her remorse and confusion, the sense that she was grieving incorrectly in her mourning that seemed both selfish and impersonal. Tomorrow — and all the days after it — was something that had only ever lived in her imagination. 

The verdant and the vermillion burst forth in tapestries of life and death, blood and blooming, the abstract strokes constituting vine and flower, all wrapping the monstrous woman from previous paintings in an exciting culmination: instead of being devoured by flames, she is at one with life and her surroundings — a wishful sentiment accentuated by the artist’s mysterious disappearance shortly after its creation.

 
The urge to confess to them was absurd, but her words erupted like new growth rooted in testimony. If this was the last thing she would ever do on this earth, why shouldn’t she give them, these hallucinations or ephemeral monsters, her feelings about what it had meant for her to live? Maybe this was what they wanted from her. “Life was like a language I couldn’t speak.” </spoiler

Like, absolutely stunning writing. I was in awe as I read this, and can't wait to read more from Tiffany Morris.

This novella is about Rita, who in the midst of her grief, is accepted to a week-long artists residency after her girlfriend Molly submitted an application on her behalf. Though Rita is rightfully pissed off at the paranoid idea that Molly is trying to simply get rid of her and have some space from her, she goes to the cabin, which coincidentally is where her estranged late father grew up. Rita begins seeing and hearing things at the cabin, especially near the swamp, and must confront her deepest fears about mortality, her relationships, and her future.

Though I have not lost a parent, I felt completely immersed in Rita's grief, anger, and fear. TM's writing imbued Rita with such fervor, anxiety, and pain that felt almost tangible! Like you could reach into the book, touch it, and pull it out. It was atmospheric, eerie, and forced you to ruminate on these things alongside Rita. I read this in one sitting, and I highly recommend it!

Author info: Tiffany Morris is a Mi’kmaw/settler writer of speculative fiction and poetry from Kjipuktuk (Halifax), Nova Scotia. 

(more) quotations that stood out to me: 
The Mi’kmaw language always sounded weird coming from her mother, even though her mother was half Mi’kmaw. She had been estranged from that side of her family for years and wouldn’t tell Rita why, wouldn’t share any knowledge with her other than a few words or phrases. She was much more into telling Rita how she should behave and what convoluted beauty rituals could improve her appearance. 
I am not indigenous, I am Filipino & Chinese, but I could so deeply relate to this quotation, as I am not fluent in any of my parents' native languages, yet the sharing of cultural knowledge that was inherently sexist and misogynistic hits so close to home. 

“To accept death is to accept your own nothingness — not the act of dying in itself, but the fact that death resides in you, the fact that you will, eventually, be dead. To be in this state of perpetual otherwise. Accepting death is the understanding that consciousness is the shell of experience, not its inner sanctum — and death becomes a pilgrimage outside the golden cage of our material existence. I don’t mean this as an encouragement of death, rather a call to understand that you, too, are nature, and nature loves above all else transmutation, and impermanence, and creation. We do not protect life by denying death’s existence, yet our capitalist and colonialist structures are based on this denial. We do not protect anything through denial.” 

 Grief formed her new reality, her new understanding of time, an invading force that occupied land and bodies in equal measure. Her memories were colonized by trauma. 

It had taken me over a year to realize that I suffered from PTSD and wasn’t bad at grief — mass culture is just that deeply avoidant about both death and trauma... Everywhere you turn in a capitalist society there are sweet and numbing routes to escapism, clichés about love, products determined to sanitize and smother in nostalgia every disorienting and uncomfortable part of the human experience.  (author's note/acknowledgements) 
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