Burned - Ellen Hopkins

Ok, I’m a little resentful towards this book. I’ll lay it out right now, its not going to be a happy review. You follow the main character who is a girl in a very southern, traditional Mormon family. Her father is an alcoholic who beats his wife and she has lots of brothers and sisters. I read a lot of complaints saying that it was a total misrepresentation of the Mormon religion, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the main point of the story. Nothing would change if they were a different religion. There are so many different sects to any form of religion I hardly think someone who isn’t familiar with it will assume every family is a carbon copy and every church or meeting place is as well.

Moving on, she has this spurt of rebellion where she starts dating a non-mormon boy behind her parents back and gets shipped off to her aunts for the summer. She is very pessimistic about things like love and affection but she wants to believe there is something bigger out there than the violent and abusive existence she is stuck in. She has no supportive friends, family; even her study group leader stonewalls her when she tries to ask questions. Then she visits her aunt and she finds something she’s never experienced before, which is love and praise, someone telling her she’s good and not worthless.

It made me believe for her that her life would get better, could get better. This book strings you along the whole time giving you hope that she can escape. But no. She doesn’t. At the end of the book everyone she loves is dead. Dead. They’re all dead. And to top it all off her family abandons her. This book made me feel really good and in the final moments near the end it dumps a whole pile of shit all over you and then a big steamroller drives right over top of you just for good measure. I don’t recommend this book unless you really prep for the most awful ending you could imagine.

I thought the book was about redemption and finding yourself and it was, but there was no need to end it so cruelly. Her life was so bad, so awful, she was treated like a maggot, she was abused physically and mentally, when she tried to change it and make a positive effort to have a better life it doesn’t, just more bad shit happens to her, culminating in 2 awful and uncalled for deaths. I was so disappointed. The title of this book is appropriate I guess. If there is any lesson it’s to not put yourself out there and try not to hope things will get better because you’ll just get burned. I would say it was a good book, just you know, DON’T read the last several pages.