It’s bad to have an enemy with the kinds of resources these people apparently have—but it is infinitely worse to have crazy people as enemies.
Taking place right on the heels of Silence Fallen , Burn Bright sees Anna and Charles are back in Aspen Creek, only this time around Bran is still out of the picture just when things start going a little bit sideways. There’s conflict both within the pack and from outside, in particular focussed on the Wildlings–a second pack of old wolves too dangerous to even be in Bran’s pack already of the most dangerous.
The idea of a bunch of a pile of unique, old, powerful wolves with a reason we’ve never heard about them before is pretty neat and worth exploring, even if it’s a little strange they’ve never even been mentioned in passing. Asil was already a neat example of dangerous old wolf teetering on the edge of sanity and the new ones are just as interesting/crazy. Pity not all of them made it, but Woolsey (spelling? I listened to the audiobook) in particular I want to see more of.
Speaking of, I really do like seeing just how much power the witches wield in these books. With werewolves and vampires and the next best thing to gods, the witches seem much more human at first and we’ve been seeing them since the very first book of each series. But the more we learn, the more we see how seriously terrifying they can be. Also the idea of binding a witch’s spell into a gun? With fae and wolves out in the open, it will be interesting to see if magic and technology can be integrated in this world.
Plotwise, I really liked how the story deals with Leah. She’s certainly been dealt a rough hand with Bran–not that she hasn’t brought a good amount of hate upon herself. There’s a reason that when a potential traitor is revealed among the pack that she’s suspect number one…
Overall, with one little caveat1, it’s a solid book. I enjoyed it more than Dead Heat . I’m curious just where we’ll go from here.
You cannot look at a person, and say, ‘If I could change this or that, if I could pick what I want and discard other things, I could love this one.’ Such a love is pale and weak—and doomed to failure.
In the first chapter of Burn Bright , there is a conversation between Anna and Charles hinting at possible romantic attraction from Bran towards Mercy , which was later apparently confirmed by Briggs in a public post. With no real hints of it in more than a dozen books otherwise, for the moment, I’m just going to ignore the whole mess. If it stays as minor a part of future books (or less) as it was of this, so it goes. If this is going to be core to future story… well, we’ll have to see then. ↩︎