Review by: Paige
Rating: ★ ★ ★
Genre: Young Adult, Mystery, Horror
Synopsis: Ever since Margot was born, it’s been just her and her mother. No answers to Margot’s questions about what came before. No history to hold on to. No relative to speak of. Just the two of them, stuck in their run-down apartment, struggling to get along.
But that’s not enough for Margot. She wants family. She wants a past. And she just found the key she needs to get it: A photograph, pointing her to a town called Phalene. Pointing her home. Only, when Margot gets there, it’s not what she bargained for.
Margot’s mother left for a reason. But was it to hide her past? Or was it to protect Margot from what’s still there?
The only thing Margot knows for sure is there’s poison in their family tree, and their roots are dug so deeply into Phalene that now that she’s there, she might never escape.
Review: It’s not often that I walk away from a book and the one question plaguing my brain is “Was that…good? Like, objectively. Was that a good book? I liked reading it. But was that good?” It tends to be that I know my own feelings quickly and decisively. I know when a book is a 3-star read, a 5-star read. While time and age can change that, of course, I know my reading experiences well. But this book left me, more than anything else, confused. I gave it 3 stars in the name of neutrality.
Now, I raved about Wilder Girls, Power’s first novel, earlier this year. And I firmly believed that this would be the book I liked even more, because this was more up my alley. And yet, the chaotic nature of this novel seeped into the reading experience for me. My thoughts were messy, jumbled, because that was how this book felt to read. I understand keeping a novel’s secrets as close to the chest for as long as possible, and normally I love that. But there were times where new, competing elements were introduced before I even got a clear sense of what that last one was about, on the surface level, and I felt like I was mentally scrambling for a foothold. Maybe I am just too used to trying to “solve” a book before the book solves itself for me, but here, I couldn’t help but feel that it wasn’t about a lack of puzzle pieces, but rather too many all at once.
To start with what I loved, I think the relationship between Margot and her mother was one of the more raw and revealing elements of this story. Without a doubt, it provided a rock-solid foundation for it. I’m lucky to have no experience with an abusive relationship, but I can imagine this struck a chord with those who do or did, or whose home lives resembled Margot and her mother’s in any way. I’ll leave true discussion of such elements to those readers who know better than me. But the back-and-forth of Margot’s feelings felt realistic to the core, and her frustration with her mother and her own self, especially once she was with her grandmother, was striking. There was no easy solution for her; her heart and her brain always felt a bit at war—I appreciated the honesty on display there.
I also loved the moments where we saw Margot as just a girl who wanted to find herself. Textually, that meant discovering the truth of her family more than anything else. But I loved the moments where discussion of her sexuality and about being a lesbian peeked through, where she talked about her conflicting feelings for Tess. I so dearly wish it had been explored more—it could have been really, really fruitful.
This book grabbed my attention fairly quickly, and once I was hooked I could not put it down. I wanted to find out everything that was waiting for me at the end, and I swallowed the novel whole. But I couldn’t help but feel that I was waiting too long for a reveal that ended up being not quite enough. The ending felt overly obvious on one level, and completely out of left field on the other. That final “twist” was hardly even a twist—I mean, did we not all see that coming? Also, are we even thinking about the same “twist”? I liked that we did get full answers eventually, but by the time they came, I had this nagging sensation that something was missing. I worried that I lost a plot thread in the shuffle, that something wasn’t adding up. While I think it all did, I still feel unsure, and that more than anything frustrated me the most about this book.
Ultimately, something was just missing for me here. I think Power created a brilliant portrait of a small town—the setting felt real, the atmosphere tangible, Phalene and Fairhaven so clear in my mind it was like watching a movie. And those journal entry bits sung. But I couldn’t grasp onto the intended eerie qualities, and I was constantly wondering if this was horror? A mystery? A thriller? I’m all for genre-blending, but once again—no foothold. I’m a huge fan of creators like M. Night Shyamalan, and I could tell Burn Our Bodies Down wanted to situate itself as a work in his vein, but it didn’t quite click. I wish I had a better sense, too, of what went wrong here for me. So much of it I loved in concept, and sometimes in execution, and yet, and yet. I look greatly, greatly forward to whatever Power does next, and I know I will be gobbling it up like I did this one, but I have to hope for a bit more than what I got here.
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