Burn Bright by Marianne de Pierres
My rating: 2/5 cats
AHA!!! i knew aussie YA couldn’t all be the very pinnacle of perfection! i knew there had to be some clunkers cluttering up their shelves!
australia – they’re just like us!
so, this one is about ixion – the island of ever-night. (read in a spooky voice, please) which is some sort of permanent goth spring break where it is always nighttime and the only rule is you gotta strive to experience pleasure all the time. it is an island of youth and raves and hallucinogenics, where there are “ripers” who oversee the whole operation, and they call everyone “baby bats” which gets annoying after, like, two times, and everyone just parties and parties and parties like it’s 1999 until they burn themselves out or until they get too old, when they are taken away by the ripers to no one knows where.
this is appealing to some youths because some of the alternatives in this world are more austere, sheltered communities where women have no say in anything and punishments are strict, or the opposite, where women live together in communities where they hunt and take care of business and only see men when they need to breed. and there are giant flying monsters, etc. so – also unappealing.
suffice it to say – somehow this island of youth where you will be guaranteed at least a few years of fun sounds good to some people. (and after watching the grotesque display of another bridge-and-tunnel st. patrick’s day in nyfc, i know exactly what type of people would be populating this island and i would stay away)
but our heroine is not in it for the sex drugs and rock and roll, nope – she is there to find her brother, who escaped to ixion, and without whom her home life has become unbearable. after he left, she was implanted with a sort of tracking device that would shock her if she tried to escape, but she managed to inure herself to the pain by daily self-inflicted punishments, raising her threshold in order to eventually be able to escape and find him. she is from the strictest quarter, where modesty and self-denial are expected from women. suddenly, she is thrust into this party-hopping scenario, where cable “kars” are taken from one club to the next, and no one ever needs to sleep; instead they take “petit nuits,” which are open-eyed and brief hypnotic states that occur only in the many churches scattered about the realm.
yeah. churches.
and seriously – why is french the default language here? all the “naif” and “fou” and “neglegere” etc…
there’s a lot of this:
and a lot of this:
and a lady-pirate. and shadow monsters that will getcha if you stray from the (literal) path.
it’s not terrible. it just feels insubstantial. flimsy. the premise never grabbed me, and i couldn’t latch on to the main character – wide-eyed from being raised in such a sheltered and cloistered environment. suddenly thrust into this excess of decadence, lusted after by every male human, creature, “riper” – there is no real explanation for it, in this environment where every pleasure and every need can be satisfied by a number of aggressively available partners, unless it is her very innocence that is supposed to make her so irresistible. i love her pain-endurance, coming as she does from such a community of self-negation it is very fitting that she would be able to withstand pain and remove herself from the protests of the capital-b body and endure what many others could not.
this book incorporates shades of the vampiric without ever fully committing to it, but the mythology needs to be fleshed out more – i read the whole damn thing and i still have no idea what this place is.
“coyness is nice” but coyness can stop you from understanding what the hell is happening and that is just not cool.
what is frustrating is that i know the author knows where she is going with this and she is just being close with her explanations. it would be one thing if i sensed that she was still working out the details, but i think she has a clear sense where she is headed, but the frustrating thing is that it was such a fluke that i got my hands on a copy of this to begin with, and who knows if book two will ever come my way, so i will probably be left in the dark, like a baby bat… forever. or until i burn out from too much partying. so – yeah – forever.
it reminded me of that stupid movie greg made me watch, even though it is not at all like that, but i don’t care. that’s all i could think of. stupid zombie rave movie. so bad.
and another thing: character names. our heroine is named retra, and other names are rollo and kero, and charlonge and suki and lenoir, and her brother’s name is…joel?? i mean, it is traditional in this world to take on a new name once you hit ixion and everything, but even before that…joel?? joel is a fine name, but it just seems so…regular when compared to the other names in this book. sorry, joel.
not a terrible book, but just one i don’t feel any particular attachment to. sorry for being a two-star charlie.
