So Johnathan got me Wilder Girls back in February, and after seeing it around social media for months, I was really excited to read it. I devoured it pretty quickly, and I thought it was really interesting. I was really interested in the themes of infection and the government control over the island and the dark goings on within the residents of island itself.
And then, since I enjoyed that one so much, I set about trying to find out if Rory Power had anything else I could read. And lo and behold, I discovered Burn Our Bodies Down, due out July 7th of this year. (Thank you to NetGalley for my e-ARC! I was thrilled to get to read it so soon!)
Burn Our Bodies Down follows Margot, who has lived with her mother Jo all her life—and it’s always been just the two of them. Jo has something of a murky past and is generally very closed off from her daughter. Despite Margot’s constant desire for Jo’s love and approval, they have a deeply dysfunctional relationship and life.
But one day, Margot discovers a clue to Jo’s past hidden away inside an old Bible, and starts off at a run to find the town where Jo grew up, as well as the grandmother she’s never known, and any other family she might have been missing out on. But what she finds is so far from what she expected, and so far from normal. As soon as her feet hit the ground on the main street of town, she encounters mystery, deception, and strange looks from everyone she meets—people who seem to already know more about her than she even knows about herself. And the longer she’s there, the more she starts to see why. Her grandmother is hiding something—something dark. Slowly, Margot begins to unearth the horrifying truth, and see that this darkness spreads further than she could have imagined.
It’s difficult, sometimes, not to compare an author’s sophomore release to their debut, and I definitely found myself doing so during my reading of Burn Our Bodies Down. Power deals in secrets, a currency she’s familiar with and handles deftly. Wilder Girls took on government secrets, medical secrets, the secrets of survival in a post-societal breakdown environment. Burn Our Bodies Down takes on family secrets, small town secrets, and the secrets of the darkness within.
I’ll admit—this one got off to a bit of a slow start for me. The first few chapters deal with Margot’s current life with her mother and the discovery of the clues about her past, then her arrival in the town where her mother grew up. She immediately meets some people, including a couple kids her own age, who unintentionally lead her right to her grandmother’s farm, where things are already going down.
But then it felt like we hit the brakes a little bit, and we got wayyy deeper into the family dynamics and mother-daughter drama, which is fine if I had known that was what I was in for, but the whole time I was just waiting to get to the horror/thriller part, when it was reading more like a generational family drama. And don’t get me wrong—there’s nothing wrong with generational family dramas. But that was so not what I was here for. I wanted to get the meat of the story. I started to lose a little bit of traction on the emotional stuff and the dysfunction between mothers and daughters. While I get how it plays into the story, it just slowed me down a bit.
BUT THEN.
Then we got to the end chapters. And then we got into the meat of the story (ironic, considering I don’t eat meat) that I had been really waiting for.
And once we found out the “big reveal” and what kind of messed up stuff had been going down, suddenly we weren’t slowing down anymore, or hitting the brakes at all. We were pushing the gas pedal to the floor and barreling full steam ahead and I was loving it. The last few chapters and ending of the book actually completely made up for the slower chapters that I hadn’t enjoyed as much, and made it all make sense why Power had been writing them that way and how everything stitched together really nicely.
I will not go into spoilers, because this book isn’t out yet, and I want people to go read it, but I will say this about the big twist/big reveal: it was actually not exactly what I was expecting. I could see some of what she was setting up, and where it might be going, but the magnitude of how horrific it is and what had actually been going on behind the scenes did surprise me, and kept me quickly turning pages trying to find out more and more and more about it. The scene where our main character discovers everything is such a gradual dawning and as it goes on, there’s this sense of dread just falling over everything like a fog rolling in and it is so intense to imagine what she must be going through.
The details of the situation are so visceral and vile, and there were a couple things that actually made me recoil a little bit. One of the details played on a certain concept in horror that always sends shivers right down my spine. The big reveal was also reminiscent of a certain subplot in one of my favorite video games, which may have made me enjoy it even more.
Overall, I’d give this one probably four out of five stars. The only drawback for me was that I felt it played a little too heavily on the generational family drama portion of it when I was wanting to really go in on the horror aspect. It’s just that Rory Power does horror so well, I wanted more of that. But I see that the way she set it up did make it more impactful, and the horror I did get was really enjoyable. I liked this one a lot, I think Power is really making a name for herself in the YA horror/thriller world, and I would recommend that you check this one out when it comes out in July!
Thank you for reading my review, and as always—stay safe, and stay sane. <3