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3.01 AVERAGE
3.01 AVERAGE
I can't believe I struggled through this mess of jangling sentence fragments and plot holes to see how this writer planned to resolve the mysteries, only to discover she never had any intention of doing so.
3.5 stars Valente's writing was thoughtful and beautiful while describing some truly horrific events surrounding a school shooting. I found it a hard but important read. Thanks to Goodreads' First Reads, I received an uncorrected proof copy of this novel.
I don't reread books too often but this one holds up. It is just as gut wrenching as when I first read it.
Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down follows four teens and their struggle dealing with a school shooting while assembling their high school yearbook. There is also an added mystery surrounding a rash of house fires that follow the shooting.
I felt sad while reading this but at the same time I felt removed from the situation, as if I were reading a news article. There is clinical information about house fires and added details about world events that I felt took away from the story. This book also has an open ending and it doesn't really give the reader much closure.
I felt sad while reading this but at the same time I felt removed from the situation, as if I were reading a news article. There is clinical information about house fires and added details about world events that I felt took away from the story. This book also has an open ending and it doesn't really give the reader much closure.
There are books out there that accurately and thoughtfully trace the process of community grief in the aftermath of an immense tragedy, such as a school shooting. They walk through the day to day life of the survivors, the ones who have to move on while dodging the attention of an entire nation, not to mention the lingering presences of the ones who died. They illustrate human suffering and loss in complex ways. They humanize the seemingly impossible to humanize. Anne Valente’s “Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down” is not one of these books.
You can read my full review of OUR HEARTS WILL BURN US DOWN at the Current independent student newspaper website. A reviewer copy of the paperback was provided for free by HarperCollins; no other compensation was offered for this review, nor was a review required to receive the book.
You can read my full review of OUR HEARTS WILL BURN US DOWN at the Current independent student newspaper website. A reviewer copy of the paperback was provided for free by HarperCollins; no other compensation was offered for this review, nor was a review required to receive the book.
Originally reviewed at: http://www.novelvisits.com/hearts-will-burn-anne-valente-review/
Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down by Anne Valente (1st novel)
Publisher: William Morrow
Release Date: October 4, 2016
Length: 384 pages
Buy on Amazon
Single Sentence Summary: Four high school juniors struggle to learn what it means to survive a school shooting that killed 35, while the town they live in begins to burn.
Primary Characters: Christina Delbano – in French class when the shootings occurred. The shooter did not enter that classroom. Matt Howell – in the bathroom when the shootings began. He watched a friend die just outside the door. Nick Ito – with others, blocked the door to the classroom he was in. Zola Walker – in the library when the shooter entered and killed many people.
Synopsis: It’s October 8, 2003 when loner, Caleb Raynor, enters Lewis and Clark High School in a suburb of St. Louis and kills 35 people, including the principal, librarian, janitor, and 28 students. The entire the nation, the community, the parents, and most of all the students are stunned, afraid, and grieving.
“But when the list emerged Friday morning, in the newspaper and across national televised news, we felt the last of our once-lives ebb away.”
After a few days of being isolated in the cocoon of their families, the four students who make up the junior portion of the yearbook committee meet. Each is suffering in different ways from what they saw and/or what they lost on that day. Still, they want to find a way to honor those whose lives were taken. The struggle to figure out how to honor friends who died so needlessly young is something each wrestles with.
Three days after the shooting, the home of one of the victims goes up in flames, killing her parents inside. A couple days later there is another fire, and another. Now, the four are faced with even more: how to understand what is happening to the people left behind. Their already unstable world is thrown further off kilter.
Review: I thought that Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down was a book that didn’t really know what it wanted to be. The part of the story that had to do with the shooting, it’s aftermath, and how Matt, Christina, Nick, and Zola coped with that tragedy was good, really good. The descriptions of where each student was, what they were thinking and doing during the shooting were fabulous. The development of each of the four main characters and their families was equally good. You really cared about these four and how they were going to be able to get by after surviving such a horrific act. That, on its own, would have made for a great story, but then the fire element was thrown in.
The mysterious fires that started taking place in the homes of the victims just seemed unnecessary to me. It muddled what the book was about. Was it the story of survival and recovery after the trauma of a mass shooting? Was it a mystery concerning how homes can go up in flames and leave no trace of the bodies inside? For me, the two themes did not blend together well and the fire element got too repetitive. I liked the first half of Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down a lot, but around the halfway point (when the action shifted to the fires) I got a little bored. Grade: C
Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down by Anne Valente (1st novel)
Publisher: William Morrow
Release Date: October 4, 2016
Length: 384 pages
Buy on Amazon
Single Sentence Summary: Four high school juniors struggle to learn what it means to survive a school shooting that killed 35, while the town they live in begins to burn.
Primary Characters: Christina Delbano – in French class when the shootings occurred. The shooter did not enter that classroom. Matt Howell – in the bathroom when the shootings began. He watched a friend die just outside the door. Nick Ito – with others, blocked the door to the classroom he was in. Zola Walker – in the library when the shooter entered and killed many people.
Synopsis: It’s October 8, 2003 when loner, Caleb Raynor, enters Lewis and Clark High School in a suburb of St. Louis and kills 35 people, including the principal, librarian, janitor, and 28 students. The entire the nation, the community, the parents, and most of all the students are stunned, afraid, and grieving.
“But when the list emerged Friday morning, in the newspaper and across national televised news, we felt the last of our once-lives ebb away.”
After a few days of being isolated in the cocoon of their families, the four students who make up the junior portion of the yearbook committee meet. Each is suffering in different ways from what they saw and/or what they lost on that day. Still, they want to find a way to honor those whose lives were taken. The struggle to figure out how to honor friends who died so needlessly young is something each wrestles with.
Three days after the shooting, the home of one of the victims goes up in flames, killing her parents inside. A couple days later there is another fire, and another. Now, the four are faced with even more: how to understand what is happening to the people left behind. Their already unstable world is thrown further off kilter.
Review: I thought that Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down was a book that didn’t really know what it wanted to be. The part of the story that had to do with the shooting, it’s aftermath, and how Matt, Christina, Nick, and Zola coped with that tragedy was good, really good. The descriptions of where each student was, what they were thinking and doing during the shooting were fabulous. The development of each of the four main characters and their families was equally good. You really cared about these four and how they were going to be able to get by after surviving such a horrific act. That, on its own, would have made for a great story, but then the fire element was thrown in.
The mysterious fires that started taking place in the homes of the victims just seemed unnecessary to me. It muddled what the book was about. Was it the story of survival and recovery after the trauma of a mass shooting? Was it a mystery concerning how homes can go up in flames and leave no trace of the bodies inside? For me, the two themes did not blend together well and the fire element got too repetitive. I liked the first half of Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down a lot, but around the halfway point (when the action shifted to the fires) I got a little bored. Grade: C
I wanted to check out this book back when it first was released. Thus the reason I was looking forward to reading this book when I got the chance with the paperback copy. In fact, this book is very timely now as it was back than.
The story started out fine. There wasn't a lot of details spent on the shooting but this is because this is the point of the story to slowly drag out the details that lead up to the horrific event. Yet, this is not why I didn't care for this book. It is because I didn't feel any connection to any of the characters. This is a character driven type of story. Also, I thought that the story was a little depressing. Survivors were dying in house fires. This was sad. After getting almost half way through the book and not feeling anything for the characters, I put this book down.
The story started out fine. There wasn't a lot of details spent on the shooting but this is because this is the point of the story to slowly drag out the details that lead up to the horrific event. Yet, this is not why I didn't care for this book. It is because I didn't feel any connection to any of the characters. This is a character driven type of story. Also, I thought that the story was a little depressing. Survivors were dying in house fires. This was sad. After getting almost half way through the book and not feeling anything for the characters, I put this book down.
Heartbreaking and painful, but beautifully rendered, this novel of a school shooting and it's aftermath through the eyes of four students will have readers hooked. Alternatively told through the omniscient "we" and through individual lenses of four yearbook club staffers, the whole story is slowly pieced together, where each of them were in the building, how they were affected, how they grieved, and how they came together to try and chronicle an indescribable event. As if the aftermath of the shooting that claimed over 20 students wasn't enough, a string of house fires ignite throughout the community, only affecting the parents and families of those that lost teenagers in the school shooting. These four, courageous, broken, questioning teens try to piece together their own and their community's sorrows. A wonderful read, not for the faint of heart.
I received this book for free from Librarything Giveaways in return for my honest, unbiased review.
I received this book for free from Librarything Giveaways in return for my honest, unbiased review.
Ugh, this book. So, I picked this up because I love a well-done first-person collective narrator and it seemed like the perfect lens through which to write a school shooting. But, that’s not really what this is. The experience of reading this was difficult. The author’s writing style is at times disengaging - abrupt transitions from interior thoughts to dialogue, run-on sentences, incomplete sentences positioned as lyrical or stylistic asides in the middle of a plot-building paragraph. Structurally and stylistically, there’s so much going on; I’m surprised the editor didn’t encourage her to pick one gimmick and stick with it throughout. The combination of news articles, bland yearbook profiles of several of the dead teens, long lists of items whose relevance to the narrative were never explained, floorplans, and long narrative passages of the teen’s chaotic feelings of grief - WOW. It made the collective narration an afterthought that was nothing more than distracting when it appeared.
The story follows 4 teens in the aftermath of a school shooting and subsequently, tragic havoc wreaked on their town. The book is billed as a collectively narrated journey through grief, adolescence, and mystery shared by the 4 yearbook editors and friends. But the fact that they’re yearbook editors felt like a burden on the plot rather than a necessity. It only added some clumsy stylistic choices and rushed plot points to the overall narrative. It also does little to explain how these 4 people ended up friends - at most points throughout the story, they seem to hardly relate to each other or even really like each other at all. The author does an excellent job of exploring teenage angst, melodrama, and feelings of permanence, and we see quite a bit of each character’s interior life - to the extent that the collective first-person almost entirely breaks down. I found myself forgetting about the shared narration and the idea of a group perspective very quickly, to the point that when the collective voice reappeared between long chapters, it felt disjointed and abrupt - like it included characters other than the 4 main protagonists. In order to reestablish the collective voice and then again reorient us with our individual narrators, there is quite a bit of repetition, which gives each of the characters a somewhat hollow perspective on the events they are supposed to be narrating for us. I would have liked to see the author lean all the way into the mysterious, unreliable, all-knowing collective first-person or commit fully to writing a chaotic, leap-frogging recounting of events through the teenager’s grief-logged minds, rather than trying to make up for the limitations of the first-person collective with long deep dives into each perspective. Here again, it feels like this could have been the conceit for a satisfying short story that would have left the author less hog-tied into delving deep into each perspective or maintaining a difficult narration choice.
We travel through these layers of grief that turn out to be entirely pointless and we receive no pay-off at the end. The gothic, almost (as suggested) inexplicably supernatural element of the fires that seem to randomly strike the homes of each of the shooting’s 28 student victims, feels separate from the rest of the plot - adolescents’ shared, chaotic experience of grief. Although it kept me reading to see if there would be a twist or revelation, ultimately I was disappointed at all the extensive exploration of feelings and scientific explanations left us with little more than an abrupt ending - the build-up to a mystery makes the reading experience that much more frustrating because it soon becomes clear there will be no resolution. Although I often enjoy reading stories without concrete ends and lingering questions that remain unanswered, I don’t think the writing or the mystery itself was engrossing enough to end satisfyingly with no resolution.
The story follows 4 teens in the aftermath of a school shooting and subsequently, tragic havoc wreaked on their town. The book is billed as a collectively narrated journey through grief, adolescence, and mystery shared by the 4 yearbook editors and friends. But the fact that they’re yearbook editors felt like a burden on the plot rather than a necessity. It only added some clumsy stylistic choices and rushed plot points to the overall narrative. It also does little to explain how these 4 people ended up friends - at most points throughout the story, they seem to hardly relate to each other or even really like each other at all. The author does an excellent job of exploring teenage angst, melodrama, and feelings of permanence, and we see quite a bit of each character’s interior life - to the extent that the collective first-person almost entirely breaks down. I found myself forgetting about the shared narration and the idea of a group perspective very quickly, to the point that when the collective voice reappeared between long chapters, it felt disjointed and abrupt - like it included characters other than the 4 main protagonists. In order to reestablish the collective voice and then again reorient us with our individual narrators, there is quite a bit of repetition, which gives each of the characters a somewhat hollow perspective on the events they are supposed to be narrating for us. I would have liked to see the author lean all the way into the mysterious, unreliable, all-knowing collective first-person or commit fully to writing a chaotic, leap-frogging recounting of events through the teenager’s grief-logged minds, rather than trying to make up for the limitations of the first-person collective with long deep dives into each perspective. Here again, it feels like this could have been the conceit for a satisfying short story that would have left the author less hog-tied into delving deep into each perspective or maintaining a difficult narration choice.
We travel through these layers of grief that turn out to be entirely pointless and we receive no pay-off at the end. The gothic, almost (as suggested) inexplicably supernatural element of the fires that seem to randomly strike the homes of each of the shooting’s 28 student victims, feels separate from the rest of the plot - adolescents’ shared, chaotic experience of grief. Although it kept me reading to see if there would be a twist or revelation, ultimately I was disappointed at all the extensive exploration of feelings and scientific explanations left us with little more than an abrupt ending - the build-up to a mystery makes the reading experience that much more frustrating because it soon becomes clear there will be no resolution. Although I often enjoy reading stories without concrete ends and lingering questions that remain unanswered, I don’t think the writing or the mystery itself was engrossing enough to end satisfyingly with no resolution.
I wanted to love this book. It seemed hauntingly beautiful, a quad of friends seeking to find resolve in their lives after a tragic school shooting took their fellow students and teachers away from them. The concept seemed promising; in the aftershock of a school shooting, the utter destruction of the homes and lives of those killed, and their families who remained. But, at the end of the day, and the end of the book, I can only give this tale 2 stars because there was no conclusion. No ending, no answers, no real peace of mind for the characters or the readers. Ms. Valente had the opportunity to make a statement here, to bring peace to all involved in this book, and instead, she walked away and left the story lines trailing in the breeze. Her writing style is unique, and I would love to see more of it, but her Stinebeck-esque way of quitting the story while readers were hanging on does not serve to promote her style. I bought this book at the airport, as I am wont to do while traveling, but it is not one that I see having longevity on my bookshelves.