Rating:

Irrational, Irreligious, and Irritating

Author: C.J. Tudor

Reverand Jack Brooks and her fourteen-year-old daughter have been sent to the disheveled, gothic village of Chapel Croft after the previous vicar’s gruesome in-church suicide. Neither woman wants to be part of this new place, but Reverand Jack is on shaky ground, and she can’t say no. When she gets to the village, fearful of the man who murdered her husband and is now out of jail, tracking her, she is welcomed by a dark history and an exorcism kit complete with an ominous verse: “But there is nothing covered up that will not be revealed and hidden that will not be known.” Meanwhile, Jack’s teenage daughter, Flo, strikes up an unlikely relationship with a disabled boy from the village, at the same time she starts to see the famous grisly apparitions of martyred girls. Legend says these girls only appear before chaos, disaster, death. But are they a warning or a talisman of things to come?

One of my horror book clubs chose The Burning Girls a long time ago, and I’ve honestly been putting off reading it. But my Audible queue was running low, and my excuses were getting flimsy. I dove in, and was instantly confused, distanced, and a little bored.

Jack is an irreverent priest, like the few other religious figurers who pop up in Burning Girls. It makes no sense why someone who says (and this is an actual quote from the book), “The Old Testament is crap. It’s full of misogyny, torture and inconsistencies,” is even a priest, and the previous vicar was little better. These bitter, hyped up, self-promoting characters with their hubristic know-it all outlook are annoying and offensive.  They deliberately undermine Christian principles of any kind, but with no backing or justification other than the “this is what I think is ok, so a good God would have to be on board.” What is the point of the religious/Christian angle, other than a drawn-out bullying in book form? And once you find out exactly what these characters have done . . . well . . . who are they to take any kind of moral stance whatsoever.

But the bullying isn’t just for Christians. The less said about the disabled character and how that entire thing is portrayed and later used for a “twist” the better. Oh, and the only two Black characters in the entire story . . .

The insults to God and Christians and anyone with disabilities aside, the entire story is a kaleidoscoping shift of half formed, overly complicated plots, and unmemorable side characters and past timeline stories that are impossible to connect, much less keep straight. There is A LOT of dead time, what with Flo wandering around the graveyard and taking pictures and Jack meeting all the creepy villagers. Very little happens, and supposedly this is intended to evoke a feeling of isolation and paranoia, but it just left me bored. Simultaneously, a lot of useless information is thrown at us, alongside an endless list of side character names.

For instance, in the beginning we’re told about Jack’s previous parish, where she spoke out against two women who were fostering children, using the money for themselves and mistreating the child. It gets grisly when the child is ritualistically murdered, and everyone somehow blames Jack for speaking out about it. It’s an entire blot on her past and her priest record . . . and takes up a lot of background info space. But then . . . it’s just dropped. It’s not relevant to anything that goes on, at all, and it never comes into play again. Same thing with the burning girl phantasms, who are rarely in the story and not even slightly relevant. And don’t get me started about the murderer tracking Jack and his deus ex machina redemption moment.

A bigger timeline, the one that the book really focuses on, involves two girls who went missing thirty years prior. This timeline gets murky and confusing, as do the shifting chapters told from endless different points of view. This, however, is the story to pay attention to more than the others. Sort of. But there is also the thing with Wrigley (the disabled boy) and Flo, which is a big dramatic thing that happens completely left field, ending in murder and fire that somehow, so incredibly loosely, leads into another twist where a side character suddenly reveals all about the old timeline. It’s nearly impossible to follow, and I resisted running the Audible back because I just wanted to finish. What a mess. Oh, and the exorcism thing, what the heck is that about???

Burning Girls really needed to just pick one track: one major story and stick with it. Instead, there are a lot of thoughts and half started stories and legends interspersed among a lot of sitting around time with Jack and Flo. The pacing is bad. The characterization is bad. The writing is ok, but the shifting perspectives is disorienting and entirely unnecessary. I felt that I wouldn’t like this novel based on the write-up, and I was correct. I was at times insulted, bored, and confused, but never interested and never engaged. Not recommended.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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