Book Review: "The Burnings" by Naomi Kelsey

"If a rich man said so, she was a witch."

The concept for this book is brilliant: the witch trials and the quintessential era of uncertainty for women. The storyline is just this: it's the 1570s and there are two settings, one is Denmark and one is Scotland. We have two separate narrators who seem at first to have very little in common with each other until their political worlds start to intertwine. From graphic depictions of horrendous violence against women to the political atmosphere of the day that keeps everyone in their told place, this book has some brilliantly explored themes and ideas.

This is where I say "however"...

HOWEVER, the execution of the book itself was poor. The first one hundred or so pages is mainly dialogue, gossip and intrigue, politics and there is hardly any real atmosphere or world building going on. It just seems like long conversations which, in the larger scope of things, you would expect people to have and so, they hold very little meaning. A lot of the book felt like it had been fluffed up for the word count in this very same way. There were these long, snappy conversations and lengthy pieces of dialogue where two or three characters would just be talking to each other about nothing in particular. This means that the book itself takes a long time to get going. Now, I love a slow-burner as much as the next person, but a slow-burner needs a lot of atmosphere and this book simply did not have that for me.

In fact, there was very little atmosphere being built other than the political one. I understand that and why that has been done, but it takes away from the reality of the situation and the reader feels like they are outside of the narrative for a long time. I did not feel like I could connect or get lost in the story, I felt like I was standing at a locked gate and watching everything happening, most of which was people talking, arguing, gossiping but nothing really happening and nothing really moving. The story fell static, flat and boring very quickly through towards the end.

By the end of the book, it does pick up a little. I am talking about the final 50 or so pages in which the story itself is coming to a close. However, because this is drastically different to the other parts of the book which present very little tension and don't enthral the reader, I feel like this pacing is misplaced. It's the wrong place to speed up the book's action, that should have been done a while ago. The ending is supposed to be where the pace starts to intensify or it starts to morph slower, steadier and make for some wonderful conclusion or cliffhanger. I've noticed this about many modern books - the book might be alright but more than often the ending is rubbish and rushed. I cannot say that this book has done anything differently. Though the ending may have been conceptually good, the writing really does ruin it.

The writing style was not for me. There was way too much dialogue and not enough atmosphere at all. There was no scene-setting, there was no intensifying the atmosphere at key moments in the story, no tension and definitely no build or denouement. I could not tell whether I was reading something that was supposed to be tense or not due to the fact that there was no effort to make it seem so. I was deeply disappointed by this missed opportunity.

All in all, this was a book filled with great potential but fell completely flat on the writing. Hopefully, in the future, the author will get more fluent with her writing style and more confident writing longer descriptions with more atmosphere. For now though, I think I will lay off books like this. There was a lot of wasted potential here and I feel like the book did not quite do the subject justice. Yes, we had some shocking treatment of women, but without the atmosphere it just sounds like someone inserted the scenes into the wrong part of a longer story. There is far too much political dialogue and gossip and not enough focus on the main story of witchcraft and the follies of man.