While We Were Burning by Sara Koffi

 

This is not as good a book as the one I read the other night, it's ... stiff, I guess; it's also like astoundingly predictable, I kept reading well after I'd emotionally checked out, out of a morbid curiosity about whether it was going to be as flipping obvious as it looked. It was exactly as flipping obvious as it looked. I'm not really a big fan of stories about sociopaths doing sociopath things without much repercussions, and that's what this book is--at least it spends enough time in the head of the vengeful psychopath so you know why she's doing what she's doing. I'm pretty sure she's wrong, and I'm pretty sure she at least mostly knows it. The fact she's a little on the omnicompetent side is a turn off. The novel wants to say all kinds of things about race and class and privilege and all-a-that but it's so rigid and clumsy that it mostly fails at that. Oh, well.