Ember Burning: A Review

Ember Burning by Jennifer Alsever

My Rating: 3/5 stars

Publisher: Sawatch Publishing

Publish Date: May 5th, 2017

Received: Netgalley provided an e-arc copy in exchange for an honest review

Purchase: Amazon

Synopsis:

Senior year was supposed to be great—that’s what Ember’s friend Maddie promised at the beginning of the year. Instead, Ember Trouvé spends the year drifting in and out of life like a ghost, haunted by her parents’ recent, tragic death.

At home, she pores over her secret obsession: pictures of missing kids— from newspaper articles, from grocery store flyers— that she’s glued inside a spiral notebook. Like her, the people are lost. Like her, she discovers, they had been looking for a way to numb their pain when they disappeared.

When Ember finds herself in Trinity Forest one day, a place locals stay away from at all costs, she befriends a group of teenagers who are out camping. Hanging out with them in the forest tainted with urban legends of witchcraft and strange disappearances, she has more fun than she can remember having. But something isn’t right.

The candy-covered wickedness she finds in Trinity proves to be a great escape, until she discovers she can never go home. Will Ember confront the truth behind her parents’ death, or stay blissfully numb and lose herself to the forest forever?

Opening Sentence: “Darkness. It can make you vanish and disappear completely from sight. At least for an instant. Maybe forever.”

Musings:

This book was nothing like I thought it would be. It was much weirder and at times even a bit confusing. In fact the characters themselves kept saying how weird each situation was and if that word wasn’t used so often I might not have thought of this book as being as strange as it was.

I really wanted to enjoy this book more, but I just ended up being put off by it. I think it focused on too many random things for me to be able to truly connect with the parts that I did like. This book is like a tangled web that you have to sift through carefully until it becomes clear, but in the end it just gets more tangled up. One of the biggest examples of this for me was that I could never understand Ember’s guilt which is a huge part of the story, she says she is the cause of her parents death, but when it is explained it still doesn’t seem like it was ever her fault. Ember’s subconscious is extremely affected by this so much so that it even is a factor with the ending of this book (which I didn’t really enjoy).

Ember Burning is just one of those books that wasn’t for me. There is were too many things that I wanted from it that just didn’t happen and then a lot of it was just plain weird. As a major fantasy lover I had some high hopes for this book, but sometimes some books just are not meant for you.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think of this book down in the comments.

-Till next time!