Customer Reviews

Burning Stones

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Original end of the world novel. But no sense of hope, or possibility at the end of the book. Completely negative and depressing. No glimmer for the reader to hold on to.

Very fast paced, and seems to tie into current events to build up a believable probability for the catastrophe.

This is a really superb first novel by the author of a very good story in Tesseracts Eleven: Amazing Canadian Speculative Fiction (Tesseracts), a yearly Canadian sf/f anthology. It is very depressing, as not only has civilization collapsed, but most of the human race is 'devolving' due to a virus & much of the immediate area is being destroyed by a wildfire, but the writing is very very good. The book is a character study about a firefighter whose daughter is devolving, a woman trying to make it to post-apocalyptic Canada to find her parents, & a female mountie who is trying to keep some semblance of order & protection in her small town area of Canada, which has been abandoned by whatever government is left. The burning stones of the title are asteroids that the firefighter & his daughter always watch.

I was surprised to find this was a first novel, although the author is a published writer. The plot was very well done and the characters interested me from the first page. The story moved along at a brisk pace and I found I couldn't put the book down until I'd finished it. I was hoping for a sequel as soon as this first book ended. This is a great read for anyone, not just speculative fiction fans. Highly recommended!

I can usually handle grim, but this was grim to a level I can't handle. The plot synopsis above is very accurate, and it's up to you if you feel that "not falling prey to the tyranny of a happy ending" or however the reviewer put it is a good thing or a bad thing.

I don't know, it seems to me that at least someone in a book has to experience some hope, some redemption, something besides loss, pain and violence. Every character in the book has everything they care about systematically stripped away. What upset me the most is that we are talking about the world's children here, innocent, defenseless children who are sickened, debased, attacked, raped, enslaved and murdered while a cataclysmic forest fire rages in the background.

As an exercise in horrific imagination, the book works well, but I had a hard time figuring out just what the larger point of this book might be. The overall theme seems to be that man not a moral animal, that he is meant to kill, and learning to kill out of vengeance or mercy is a lost art we need to recover. Well, okay, but in our very present world, killing takes place all day, every day, for every reason. This doesn't exactly seem to be a "fresh" insight.

The quality of the writing is good, the characterization is actually adept, the future was well-imagined (it might have been more merciful if it were less so) and the plot keeps moving, but since all the movement was deeper into the slough of despond, I can't give the book a good rating.