“Sometimes you just have to feel bad about a thing. Sometimes that’s the only thing that makes you human.” [loc. 1197]
Washington state, 1957: Sarah Dewhurst is fifteen years old, already accustomed to racism (her mother, now dead, was Black), and working hard on her father's farm in the hope that they can make it through another year. Her father, Gareth, has hired a dragon to clear a couple of fields, but warns Sarah not to think of the dragon as 'he', not to think of it as anything but an animal without a soul.
Sarah thinks differently. The dragon, Kazimir, seems to like her: he protects her and her friend Jason Inigawa (born in the US of Japanese parents) from racist Deputy Kelby, and tells her that she is the subject of an ancient prophecy, and may be in danger.
Meanwhile, over the border in Canada, FBI Agents Dernovich and Woolf -- well out of their jurisdiction -- are on the trail of a teenage assassin. Dernovich doesn't especially like Woolf, but he respects her knowledge of the Believer cult, which worships dragons, believing them to be embodied angels. (The dragons, who've withdrawn to remote regions since the last human/dragon war in the 1700s, mostly ignore the Believers.) The assassin, Malcolm, has been chosen to save the world by the Mitera Thea, the 'high priestess' of the Believers, and she's taught him the skills to ensure that nobody can stop him. Until he encounters Nelson, a queer teenager who's been kicked out by his parents and offers Malcolm a ride south.
And any day now the Russians are going to launch a satellite, which may provoke a human war.
I was immediately engaged by this novel, and it didn't disappoint. Ness is very good at portraying teenagers: Sarah and Malcolm are utterly credible and very relatable. I liked the older generation too: even Agent Dernovich turned out to be a decent fellow. Likeable characters (on the whole) with interesting moral dilemmas and the baggage of their own, sometimes inaccurate, beliefs.
The worldbuilding is lightly sketched, with just enough detail to tantalise. There have been dragons in Sarah's world for millennia, though the geological record is curiously devoid of their remains. There's a dragon in the Wife of Bath's Tale; dragons are unhappy about the rise of commercial air travel. And of course there are differences that have nothing to do with dragons. Dollar bills feature Aaron Burr's portrait ...
There's a lot to unpick in Burn: parenthood, revenge, indoctrination, homophobia and racism, the nature of prophecy, the redemptive power of love. Though there are dragons, there is also science, with Schrodinger's many-worlds hypothesis a key element of the plot. There is also quite a lot of often-explicit violence, on an individual and a mass level. (All hand-to-hand fights seem to involve someone losing a tooth.) Ness never loses control of the narrative or the multiple narrators, and the complex chains of causality seem clear and reasonable. And -- sign of a good novel -- I would like to read the characters' backstories. (How did Kazimir lose an eye?)
Published as 'young adult' (despite the body-count and the twisty plot) but very well-constructed and powerfully written.
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