YA Bookish Reviews: Ember Burning by Jennifer Alsever

Synopsis from Goodreads:

Senior year was supposed to be great-- instead, Ember Trouve spends the year drifting in and out of life like a ghost, haunted by her parents' recent, tragic death. At home she pores over her secret obsession: pictures of missing kids that she's glued inside a spiral notebook. Like her, the people are lost. Like her they had been looking for a way to numb their pain when they disappeared.

When Ember finds herself in Trinity Forest one day, a place locals stay away from at all costs, she befriends a group of teenagers who are out camping. Hanging out with them in the forest tainted with urban legends of witchcraft and strange disappearances, she has more fun than she can remember having. But something isn't right. Will Ember confront the truth behind her parents' death, or stay blissfully numb and lose herself to the forest forever? 

Ember Burning is a Twisty Turny & Deliciously Dark Read

Riveted Resolution 3. Start a new series

The first book in Jennifer Alsever’s Trinity Forest trilogy Ember Burning is like a polaroid photo.

A blank square shoots out instantaneously from the camera but it takes time for the details and colours to being to develop. While the voice in Ember Burning  is fast-paced and the pages fly by, the narrative carefully teases out details with each chapter. Jennifer Alsever has a poised hand and head for sprinkling out little clues and details to keep us moving forward, but without spoiling everything and nary an info-dump of knowledge in sight!

Our protagonist Ember keeps her grief and shame clasped around her like a cape pinned tightly with a brooch. Her parents are dead, her older brother is miles away and her new residence with her stern Gram is anything but fuzzy blankets and warm chocolate chip cookies. She goes about her day to day life in her small town Leadville, Colorado, lackluster and uninspired. One of the only things that keeps Ember going everyday is the siren song of the forbidden Trinity Forest. Ember’s mom too, before her death, was obsessed with what she called the “Bermuda Triangle” of Colorado and was fixated on the numbers of people who’d gone missing in it over the years.

From the first passage to the last one of the most stunning things about Ember Burning is what a sensory experience it is. This is the kind of novel that brings each breath of wind, crunch of leaves, and shush of brush to life. There’s a vibrancy to these descriptions that make Ember’s ventures into Trinity Forest go beyond just black text on bound pages. The climate and mood of the Forest changes with the flick of a wrist.  It’s at turns enchanting and foreboding.

The Forest film starring Natalie Dormer has similar vibes to Ember Burning.

Trinity is a refuge from the harsh reality of Leadville. It’s a world away from the small town where Ember is known as the orphan and the aimlessly wandering broken girl. Her new friends don’t know about Ember’s past, secret vices or her murky future. It’s in this forested Neverland that Ember sheds the layer of sadness that settled upon her like a second skin. She learns how to be herself again.

Ember is a resilient character who grows tremendously over the span of this 362 page book. She starts off salty and insecure, often resenting herself and indulging in the occasional pity party. Yet her whiney ways soon give way to a more complex set of emotions. Beyond her grief she’s ashamed, and that leaves the deepest and most painful scars. Ember is so so so so very flawed. She’s a flesh and blood teenager in the throes of depression. She’s not a fifteen-going-twenty-five overinflated “chosen one”.

Each of Ember Burning’s  supporting characters, the Trinity dwelling teens has a distinctive voice, personality and appearance. Not only could they be real people, but they could be real people we know or maybe even who we were at some point in our life. There’s  solid female friendships between Lilly and Zoe and Ember, but also with the guys: Pete and Trevor, or ‘Tre’. The  depiction of the friendship is breezy and believable because there’s no forced “teen-speak” or excessive swearing/ slang here. And praise the powers that be, there are no love triangles!

The lost children and sinister supernatural forces vibes in Ember Burning are similar to Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children and the podcast The Black Tapes with its storylines surrounding creepy cults and diabolical human and inhuman antagonists. If you’re a fan of either of those you’ve got to pick this book up.

This is no ordinary contemporary YA fiction. Ember Burning is an atmospheric twisty turny and deliciously dark read. It takes some daring risks, diverging from the direction it seems to be going in more than once. Cue the racing hearts, rashes of goosebumps and jello legs.Trinity Forest is a dense wood that defies the laws of reality. It’s eerie and more than a little chilling and with it’s history of disappearances and sinister fog it vaguely resembles the Aokigahara Forest in Japan: most infamously known as the “suicide forest”.

******

The cool pine scent in the air invigorates me. The full moon shines bright. I perch on rock the size of my old kitchen table and take in the view of the sky.

“My mom used to tell me something about the night-time sky.” Tre leans against a tree, his silhouette barely visible in the dark.

“She’d say the stars represented all the lost souls out there-- just fighting to be seen again,” he says.

******

The Forest photo from IMDB 

Ember Burning doesn’t rely too often on typical tropes that some YA novels cling to. At first it seems like Tre is going to be yet another Tall, Dark, and Handsome, mysterious bad boy. I’m not a fan of guyliner wearing, leather clad, arrogantly handsome characters . Especially the ones that are frigid and ridiculously rude to not just their potential love interests but to their friends too. Not gonna lie, I cringed at his (cliche) debut and his initially one-dimensional character. I furiously hoped and wished it’d be a fluke thing because we don’t need anymore Fours, Edwards, or Gales.  Thank goodness it dissipates: it turns out that there’s actually a deliberateness to his character.

That said Ember Burning is occasionally descriptive to a fault. Sometimes we’re ambushed with an excess of adjectives and it becomes challenging to wade through it all. These were the moments that I  found myself starting to skim a bit through the words. Once I was done doggy paddling through the onslaught of details I found myself pulled out of the book and a needed a moment to get absorbed into the narrative again.

Ember’s escape from the confines of her ordinary life into a supernatural realm, one that’s surrounded by ominous mysteries and formidable inhabitants, is deeply disturbing and unputdownable. An abundance of mature themes such as sexual abuse and harassment, drug use and mental illness are peppered throughout Ember Burning. None of them are  sensationalized or used as  flimsy plot devices though, it’s tastefully done and ought not be activating or triggering to sensitive readers.

So are you ready to step off the Trinity’s trail and slink behind the dense rows of trees to discover an elegant but forsaken mansion and it’s cursed and sordid secrets?  

Recommended: Yes!  The ending strikes a delicate balance: it’s  enticing enough to get us to pick up the second book Oshun Rising while it also gives  Ember Burning roots sturdy enough that it can be a stand-alone novel.

I received a copy of Ember Burning from Jennifer Alsever for the purpose of reviewing. Thank you so much!!