Author: Laura Bates
Publication Date: 7 April 2020
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Page Count: 352
Reading Method: Digital ARC
Synopsis:
What happens when you can’t run or hide from a mistake that goes viral?
New school. Check.
New town. Check.
New last name. Check.
Social media profiles? Deleted.
Anna and her mother have moved hundreds of miles to put the past behind them. Anna hopes to make a fresh start and escape the harassment she’s been subjected to. But then rumors and whispers start, and Anna tries to ignore what is happening by immersing herself in learning about Maggie, a local woman accused of witchcraft in the seventeenth century. A woman who was shamed. Silenced. And whose story has unsettling parallels to Anna’s own.
Review:
Let me preface this review with this: This book comes with a plethora of content warnings -child pornography, bullying, and rape. It deals with some very heavy topics.
The story starts out with Anna moving to a new town following a mysterious incident at her previous school. We aren’t quite sure what has happened, but we can guess it’s pretty bad. She is also struggling with the recent loss of her father.
Throughout the story we get a sense of the immense pain Anna is going through as she tries to make a place for herself in her new school. When she’s assigned a project to research the local history, she discovers Maggie – a woman accused of witchcraft in the seventeenth century. The parallels between Anna and Maggie’s stories become more evident as we learn more about each girl’s past. There are a lot of heavy topics to unpack in this story, but I think it’s a fairly decent depiction of the struggles of modern life and how women were treated in the past.
It’s not all heavy though! We get to see Anna make new friends and relationships along the way. There’s also a really lovely bit of character development for Anna’s mother.
I really enjoyed this story.
You can purchase a copy of The Burning here (amazon) or here (book depository)
Learn more about Laura Bates here
