A hitchhiker’s guide to your next favourite book
Matt Shipley (he/him) // Co-Editor-In-Chief
The Ones We Burn, by Rebecca Mix
Ranka is tired of death. All she wants now is to be left alone, living out her days in Witchik’s wild north with the coven that raised her, attempting to forget the horrors of her past. But when she is named Bloodwinn, the next treaty bride to the human kingdom of Isodal, her coven sends her south with a single directive: kill him. Easy enough, for a blood-witch whose magic compels her to kill.
Wow. This one caught me by surprise from the moment I picked it up, not least because of the absolutely gorgeous cover art. It’s a long one (I tend to do that) but it’s doable in a day. I read it over about five hundred miles on the I-5, so I may have some cool-road-trip bias, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that this is not a book to miss.
First off: I love the way this book begins. It’s no secret that a bestseller needs a strong, action-packed opening sequence to hook the reader, but I’ve read many books that don’t pull it off nearly as well as this. The author doesn’t give the reader many moments to rest between the action, which is what makes the few interspersed pages of respite so tender. The structure is formulaic, but very well done. It’s obvious that this novel was a long-waiting labour of love, which is by far the most important detail in my eyes.
The Good: Characters. I would have so much more to say here if the character design didn’t blow everything else out of the water. Aramis and Percy in particular were both strong in their own right, and Percy especially contributed so much to the book’s worldbuilding that I don’t think it would have done nearly as well without him. Ongrum was a perfect soft villainess — even though it was evident from the get-go that she would become the antagonist by the end, the main character’s perspective managed to shift that turning point far later into the book.
The Bad: As I mentioned previously, this novel follows the Golden Brick Road to the New York Publishing Houses to an absolute T. Main character gets married off to an evil family who she ends up liking, has to make a choice between old family and new romance, chooses the old family, regrets it, changes her ways and boom. It’s tried-and-true (it certainly kept me reading, though I’ve read many similarly-plotted books) and if it works, it works. I just feel like we’re seeing a narrowing of the scope that publishers want to see, meaning most of the stories we’re sold operate on very similar plot points. Importantly, this is a debut novel, and now that Mix has broken into the business (a very hard thing to do) I hope that she’ll be able to branch out and write more daring storylines.
All in all, I very much enjoyed this book. To anyone who’s into sapphic romances, this one’s for you, whether or not you’re into fantasy. It seemed a tad cheesy at times, and on rare occasions I felt that the decisions being made were more for the advancement of the aforementioned Golden Brick Road than for the actual logic of what humans would do. The prose alone has beholden me to the purchase of every subsequent book by Mix — it’s a high point of the novel, for sure.
You may have noticed that I haven’t talked about endings much. It’s not because I don’t want to spoil them — especially in stories like this, it’s pretty easy to tell how they’ll end — it’s because in terms of endings, I am a raging masochist. I want the ending to be as messy, unsatisfying and thought-provoking as possible, no matter how angry it makes me. This book, however, had a perfect chance to do just that. Finally, I was about to read an ending that satisfied my craving for unique, raw, real conclusions — ones that feel authentic, ones that portray the truly shattering nature that fantasy wars tend to possess without… wrapping it into a shiny little happily-ever-after box like this one did. I truly have nothing against this — there’s no way an ending like that would make it past the publishing house — but please, New York. Broken endings don’t have to be restricted to self-published books and Natasha Ngan’s Girls series. Give the people a breath of fresh air.
8/10