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Burn

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But with the adding of all the secondary topics and arguments and problems, the plot got covered up, it got muddy; in fact, it suffocated under the weight of all these other topics. It lost its focus and drive. Sometimes you just have to feel bad about a thing. Sometimes that's the only thing that makes you human.

Burn by Patrick Ness How does the world end? Read a review of Burn by Patrick Ness

Filmic scenes offer striking images: a car in the claws of a dragon, a shoot-out straight from TarantinoSarah Dewhurst and her father, outcasts in their little town of Frome, Washington, are forced to hire a dragon to work their farm, something only the poorest of the poor ever have to resort to.

Burn by Patrick Ness - Book Review - Whispering Stories Burn by Patrick Ness - Book Review - Whispering Stories

Combined with that is the fact that gay love, not straight love, is what causes the whole “change in the course of history” in this book. I know, it seems like a small thing, but after so many books where it’s straight love that saves the day, this feels like a breath of fresh air. Ness’s borrowings from previous children’s literature add to the strength of his narrative. CS Lewis’s transformation of Eustace Scrubb into a dragon because of his greedy, hoarding nature underpins the movement of the main plot. Philip Pullman’s subtle knife, which opens up portals between worlds, is transformed into a claw taken from the dragon goddess herself, transporting the main characters into a parallel universe. You would think that the story would conclude when Malcolm reaches his target, but it doesn’t. This is only partway through and another storyline begins. There were certainly plenty of twists and I wasn’t expecting the book to change the direction the way it did. There is SO much that I loved about this book that I cannot even tell you for the sake of spoilers. Places I did not see things going. And like, it's seriously SO GREAT so can you just trust me? Awesome thanks. Here's what I can tell you: It's very much the 50s we know, including the racism, but it has dragons it. Somehow this never feels shoehorned in, it just works seamlessly. We have a full cast of diverse characters, the farm girl, her Japanese boyfriend, the gay assassin coming to kill her, the detectives following the assassin, the giant blue dragon I kinda want to marry? Is that weird?Whether or not you appreciate multiple points of views in storytelling is down to personal preference. For me, I’m not the biggest fan, so that might’ve contributed to my ambivalence. Although, even beyond my preferences, I thought Burn suffered from this approach as it became a little too fragmented. The character developments felt incomplete and the plot pace didn’t quite hit the synergy it needed to gel the individual points of view together. Then with the deaths of family and friends, and people I thought would have a better ending. Then because of war in their dimension Sarah gets to live with both her dead parents, who did not die of bullets and cancer due to this being another dimension. For these books, I’ve won the Carnegie Medal twice, the Costa Children’s Book Award, the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Red House Book Award, the Jugendliteratur Preis, the UKLA Award, the Booktrust Teenage Prize and the fabulous, fabulous, fabulous Jim Kay also won the Greenaway for his illustrations in A Monster Calls (so buy that version, would you?).

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