I love Peter Heller's books, and Burn offers a wonderfully complicated friendship, meaningful connections to nature, momentous secrets, and looming danger. But the lack of resolution at the end of the novel left me feeling deeply unsatisfied.
Jess and Storey are childhood friends who spend their summer adventures exploring striking, remote areas of the U.S.
This summer they head to Maine to camp, fish, and hike. Maine, like other states across the country, has been swept by a secession movement, but Jess and Storey assume the conflicts and political upheaval won't touch them out in the wild, and they figure that the charged friction might even die down while they're in the woods.
After weeks in the wild, they're shocked to come upon a town that's been blown apart. The bridge has burned, cars along the road are black and smoking, and shells of buildings teeter.
The friends soon realize that conflicting political ideologies have led to this horror here and elsewhere in the country--and that they must use their wilderness expertise and dodge armed men (militia or U.S. military; they're unsure) in order to make it out to safety.
Jess and Storey's situation becomes more and more complicated as they encounter survivors--some with deadly intentions, some needing life-saving help. And all the while, Jess and Storey are considering the worth of their own lives--and keeping enormous secrets from each other.
Flashbacks delve into their friends-like-family years of linked lives--and a disturbing revelation that either stretches the bounds of acceptability or goes well beyond conventional limits on a skewed pairing of power, age, and relationship.
I love Peter Heller books--the connection to the wilderness, the layered friends-like-family relationships, the looming danger. I'll read anything Heller puts down on paper. But the lack of resolution involved in Burn's (non-)ending here made me crazy with frustration. I felt like the fascinating build-up in so many areas of the story warranted much more at the novel's close.
I read Burn courtesy of Knopf and NetGalley.
Do you have any Bossy thoughts about this book?
Heller is also the author of The Last Ranger, The Guide, The River, and The Painter, as well as the stellar novel The Dog Stars.
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