Review: Burden Falls, by Kat Ellis

Rating:

🍎🍎🍎.5

First Response:

This book was good, but not for me. It was a little too YA for my taste.

One Sentence Summary:

Ava Thorne is adjusting to the loss of everything he holds dear… and a town ghost seems to be killing kids.

Tell Me More:

Ok, lissen:

I listened to this book on audiobook, and it made almost no impression on my brain; which is weird because I listen to almost all my books on audiobook now, and most of them leave some sort of residue; but this one just slid off. It also probably doesn't help that I took a nap before writing this review.

On the surface, this book is about a girl named Ava Thorne who has just lost the house she grew up in. Her parents have died, and her uncle isn't as well off as her dad was, so they've had to sell the house. Ava is a budding comics artist, and is bent on getting into "the summer art program" that her teachers must recommend her for.

But then kids start dying. With their eyes gouged out.

No biggie, right?

Wrong! Because Burden Falls is haunted by Dead-Eye Sadie. Nobody knows where Sadie came from, but she's the local spook (we learn eventually where she came from in the course of the narrative). What follows is a cute little mystery novel in the vein of Let's Split Up, but with less Scooby and more witchcraft.

This book primarily didn't work for me because of it's YA protagonist. Perhaps if I'd been a satanist teen goth girl with witchy lesbian best friends I'd have been more into it, but for me the "high school drama" of it all just got in the way of what I was actually interested in: the mystery and the lore. The lore was good when it was front and center. The local haint, the town history, the Montague-Capulet style rivalry between the Thornes and the Millers-- I was on board for all of that. Watching Ava be an angsty teen? Not really my cup of tea.

On a side note, this book was the first book I've read that had a satanist as it's protagonist. Ava invokes Lucifer and "the Dark Lord" several times in the novel; and this portrayal brings up something that I'd never thought of in regards to portrayals of satanism in media: I can't tell if she's serious or not. Sure, she invokes "the Dark Lord" several times, but it's always over small things, like her car starting. And she never mentions her religion anywhere else in the novel. She never even calls herself a satanist. I guess I could classify her as a non-practicing satanist, in the same way that people who never go to church might still invoke Jesus. There's no Christianity in this book, however. Even the local symbol to ward off evil is the evil eye, rather than the cross. I thought that was a little weird for a small town in Indiana. Rural heartland America with no churches and less Jesus? felt unrealistic to me.

This book is getting 3.5 🍎s (There's a whole thing about apples in the book. The Thornes distilled hard apple cider until the trees died, a contributing factor to the sale of the house.) because it was slightly better than most of my 3 star reads. The YA-ness of it will keep me from ever wanting to read it again, but that's a me thing. I definitely recommend this book to people who like mysteries and spooky stories!