Review: Bright We Burn

Bright We Burn by Kiersten White
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Well, nobody's perfect. I picked this one up only because my library had extra copies on the Lucky Day shelf - otherwise I had no intention of placing a hold on it or anything, not after I found the first two books to yield such diminishing returns. I can tell you that this final entry in the trilogy is an improvement over Now I Rise. For one thing, it's a shorter book - which is great because the nearly 500-page first two books, especially Now I Rise, both felt super bloated while this one is more streamlined to wrap things up. Though I'm more than a bit disappointed that there's a lot less opposition to Lada, I also feel that that kinda reflects our real-world disappointment in Trump's enablers who let him run roughshod and hide behind a populist veil of virtue when he's really just nakedly manipulative and setting the world on fire just to watch it burn. Which is basically what Lada is, let's face it. But of course we still have Radu, ever the tender-hearted guy who really gets into the thick of things this time around, but still is run by his heart and soul the whole time. As with the first two books, Radu's the main reason why I'm reading. I could think of so many ways I'd write this series instead, if it were mine. Like, it'd be a standalone, and it'd probably have Radu and Mehmet be a canon couple, and Radu would actually be the main character with nothing in Lada's POV whatsoever.

But for now, I bid this trilogy anoshe and hope that, while a lot of Kiersten White books have somewhat disappointed me in the past, her next two books - Elizabeth Frankenstein and, of course, Slayer - impress me a hell of a lot more.

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