In which the corn is blighted

[bloodygranuaile]

My library hold for Rory Power’s Burn Our Bodies Down came in just in time for me to use it as a way to avoid watching any news on Election Night, and I knew that if it was nearly as good as Wilder Girls it would keep me sufficiently distracted for the night. 

 

Short version: It was. I read over half the book on Tuesday night, lamentably had stuff to do Wednesday and Thursday, and polished it off Friday. 

 

This book is about a 17-year-old girl named Margot who lives with her objectively insane mother in a dilapidated apartment in a dilapidated town somewhere out West, judging by the amount of corn (I think it might be in Nebraska somewhere). Margot and her mom’s life is neither materially abundant nor emotionally healthy, and Margot is itching to get out and find something else about the rest of her family--who they are, why they’re estranged, if they really exist--but her mom has given her literally nothing to go on, and expressly forbidden her from ever asking. This all changes when Margot finds a photo of her mother with a phone number on it, allowing her to contact her grandmother in a town called Phalene. Following another fight with her mother, Margot runs off to Phalene, which, it turns out, is also fairly dilapidated and surrounded by corn, although bits of it clearly used to be quaint. It is here that Margot meets her grandmother, who, it turns out, also seems pretty insane and won’t tell her anything; Tess, the beautiful daughter of what is currently the richest family in town, now that Margot’s family isn’t it anymore; and a handful of other people, most of whom aren’t very important. 

 

Pretty much the first thing that happens when Margot arrives is that there’s a fire on her grandmother’s land. It turns out there was also a fire when Margot’s mother ran away seventeen years ago, and, perhaps unsurprisingly but no less satisfyingly, there will be another fire before the end of the book. 

 

The bulk of the book is mostly Margot and Tess trying to solve the mystery of the fire and of why Margot and her mother and her grandmother look so eerily alike, more like clones of each other than regular descendants. There was also another girl who looked just like them who Margot found dead in the fire when she arrived, so that’s the mystery Margot and Tess start out trying to solve, but solving it necessarily means figuring out everything that’s going on. I don’t want to spoiler what’s going on but let’s just say I was sort of correct when I guessed “clones” but not quite in the way I was expecting. Much like Wilder Girls, it’s very atmospheric and creepy, although the atmosphere is much different--it’s got a very hot, suffocating, post-industrial Southern Gothic sort of vibe (or Midwestern Gothic? Is that a thing? Idunno, it feels Southern Gothic to me but dryer and with more corn), with its decaying small towns and multigenerational family secrets. 

 

Anyway, if you like creepy atmospherics and dark family secrets and socially maladjusted queer protagonists and lots of fire, you will probably like Burn Our Bodies Down! I did, at least.