Book Review: Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down
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This is my book review of Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down by author Anne Valente.
Book Summary:
Four teenagers’ lives are turned upside down when there’s a shooting at their school. The story is about the aftermath and its effects on their lives.
Nick, Zola, Matt, and Christina are juniors at Lewis and Clark High School and members of the yearbook committee. They captured special moments like plays, football games, dances, an fund-drives.
Now it’s up to them to document this horrible tragedy that upended their lives and shattered their innocence. To report on a classmate who shot up their school.
How can kids comprehend such an event in their lives? But they are driven by a sense of responsibility to their town, their parents, and also their school. Lewis and Clark High School will forever be known as the town where a mass shooting occurred.
But these four know that they’re lucky to be alive, and that they must honor the memory of their classmates who died. There are still good memories that they feel will be forgotten in the event of this violent and tragic act.
But something else rocks this small suburban St. Louis town. There are mysterious house fires that have hit the families of the victims. This is pushing the grieving town to the edge in the face of such madness.
My Review:
This is another story about school shootings by students, something that happens far too often. Yet gun laws are not strengthened.
The book was well written and fully captured my attention. It was a page turner for sure.
I envied this author’s writing style. She has a particularly clever way with words, and I’d love to read more books by this debut author.
However, the book’s ending fell somewhat short of my expectations. I felt the suspense built throughout the book, but the ending didn’t answer the questions I still had.
About the Author:
Anne Valente’s debut novel, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down, was selected as a Midwest Connection Pick and an Amazon Best Book of the Month. Her second novel, Utah, is forthcoming from William Morrow in 2019.
Her first book and short story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names, won the Dzanc Books Short Story Prize (2014). She is also the author of the fiction chapbook, An Elegy for Mathematics.
She holds an MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University and a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Cincinnati. Originally from St. Louis, she currently lives in upstate New York. Valente teaches creative writing and literature at Hamilton College.
