I love young adult mystery thrillers. This one had a lot of twists and turns I didn’t see coming, and I loved the mysterious aspect.

Social media and the witch hunts is definitely a comparison I've seen before, especially when it comes to sexual behavior. It's interesting, I guess. And it contributes to the conversation about sexual politics.

The Burning by Laura Bates was an exciting read start to finish. I love a good high school YA story that is a page turner. This book covers a lot of heavy topics, so be sure to check content warnings.

This was such a great read! I really wanted to know what was going on, if there were actually witches and magic, or if it was girls that were accused of witches, who were wiccan or something. And it was such a great feminist story!

This book dealt with a lot of heavy topics, basically everything a teenager could deal with. Of course harassment and assault, and oh, the msognyny and sexisum and double standards, which were all really aggravating. So that was a good conversation to have. Though I've seen a complaint that I agree with-that there should've been fewer issues, and more depth and exploration of those that remained, because they got broad strokes, but not a lot of focus.

The fact that modern day cyberbullying was compared to burning witches at the stake...it was eerie. The internet has given us a lot of great things, but it also gave people the anonymity to spread some really nasty things.

There were a lot of fantastic moments, like when Anna's mom stands up for her, or when she stands up against the bullies, that are those feel good, good conquers bad, moments. She's dealt with a lot, and so that was just really great to read!

I had a great time reading this book and I can't wait to read more by Laura Bates!

This book is a fantastic read! I loved the plot and I loved how it moved with the story and how well the characters were flushed out, they seem like real people. This book is a fascinating look at sexism and misogyny and how women are treated according to what others think of them. I think the story as a vehicle for those ideas is brilliant, and I enjoyed every minute of this book!

Another ARC that is very late. I was sort of putting it off because I was expecting this to be a hard-hitting book, as a modern day girl starts to relate to a historical woman who suffers under a witch hunt. And it was a hard-hitting book because a lot of the stuff is happening now. As the author pointed out in their note, it had happened to girls she has taught.

Anna moves to Scotland for a reason we don't know about at first, but it comes out later that she was the victim of vicious cyber-bullying after her ex-boyfriend shared photos she had sent to him. She is making friends and all that, but then her old life is exposed and she has to deal with those new friends, the bullying, hiding it from her mum and trusting a new guy as well. There is a lot going on in her life, even without the research she is doing into a woman who was burned as a witch centuries before.

I found this a really interesting book. The plot is hard hitting but more hopeful than I thought it would be, not to mention I liked reading about Anna exploring her new town and researching this woman who lived so long ago and why she had been burnt as a witch. Along the way she discovers that sometimes adults can be just as prejudiced as the teenagers she goes to school with and that sometimes the adults who love her don't know how to react when something like this happens. Her new friends and love interest were all involved in the story but really this centred around Anna.

The only thing I would say is that sometimes the book slides into the fantastical/mystical but doesn't ever fully committ to it and I wish we had answers one way or the other. That said, this is definitely a book I wish I had picked up earlier and would recommend.

4.5 stars!

Throughout this whole book all I wanted to know was WHAT HAPPENED! And Laura Bates kept me reading until I found out! Really enjoyed this high school thriller!

This book should be required reading in schools! Bates takes a critical look at how women and girls have been objectified and vilified since the beginning of time. Most YA books that deal with feminism and/or sexual harassment tend to stick with the current time period, but it was so interesting to see how much history and present intersect.

I was super hyped to start The Burning and sadly was let down. The story started off strong with the main character moving to a new home.....then the pace just seemed to slow down. It was creepy. It was atmospheric. But it was slow. I did not finish it.

I did quite enjoy the plot of this book although the writing was messy and the dialogue was confusing at times and hard to read. Despite these I really liked the book and would recommend

3 stars.
I was given an ebook ARC of this book by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Anna is trying to have a fresh start. After being bullied and slut shammed for private pictures she had sent her boyfriend, her mother and her pack up and move to a new town, trying to start over. But her past quickly catches up to her. Maggie is a girl from the same village but lives in the 1600s. After a violent encounter, Maggie finds herself pregnant and unwed, the ultimate shame, and when the alleged father goes missing at sea, Maggie is accused of witchcraft.
Although Anna and Maggie live centuries apart, they are fighting very similar battles. Women have been harassed, shammed and silenced throughout history. An endless cycle of double standards have created some extremely toxic environments that women are made to feel helpless and responsible for. Things like revenge porn, cyber bullying and sexual assault are blamed on the victim before anyone even considers whose actions are really to blame. This book is an excellent example of strong women being put in some very tough situations and their struggles to find their voice, support or justice.
The story itself was a little dull at times. While Anna was going through her issues, sometimes the plot seemed to lag, like no progress was being made, just more and more examples of the hate she was experiencing. While you sympathize with the character, you also want to see the story progress. Anna and Maggie will stay with me for a while, their determination and strength are fantastic examples of strong characters.

What happens when you can’t run or hide from a mistake that goes viral?

The Burning centres around social media, cyber bullying and friendship.
Whilst the book starts slow and can drag, overall it is a fantastic read that I highly recommend!!

cw: rape, sexual assault, homophobic slurs, misogyny, slut shaming, abortion, revenge porn

There’s nothing to trace Anna back to her old life. Nothing to link her to the ‘incident’.

At least that’s what she thinks … until the whispers start up again. As time begins to run out on her secrets, Anna finds herself irresistibly drawn to the tale of Maggie, a local girl accused of witchcraft centuries earlier. A girl whose story has terrifying parallels to Anna’s own…

Teenage years SUCK. They suck even more when you make a mistake with a boy you like and are scared to be humiliated by (and he ends up humiliating you any way).

This is a powerfully moving story about feeling alone, feeling scared to speak up and a school doing an awful job of protecting the children in it’s care (punishing the victim, so the ‘girls will know this behaviour is inappropriate’, rather than punishing the students that are sharing, bullying and harassing Anna.

It’s a story that is probably too common today and it shows Anna finding the courage to finally speak up and speak back to the people who are belittling her, calling her a slut or a whore. About finding friendship and fighting for it. It’s so powerful and so moving, a call to action about the implication of sexism. It’s brilliant. So brilliant.

This book deals with a whole lot of very triggering content, so be aware of that going in. While I enjoyed this book, I think this one touches on so many topics that the novel sort of loses itself at times. I think we would have been better served if just 1-2 hard topics had been used... we don't have to stick our fingers in all the pots. Having said that, Bates has an obvious talent for handling triggering content and I can't wait to see what she does next.

I ended up not getting to this title before it was archived, and haven't yet had a chance to read it. However, it's at the top of my To Be Read list. I love the cover so very much. The coloring and fire as an outline is so aesthetically pleasing. I've only heard good things, and the description is so interesting. I really love books like this so I can only imagine I'll love it when I finally have a chance to read The Burning.

This book was hard to read, this is nothing to say of the book and more of society's prevalence on how we view trigger topics such as slut-shaming and rape. It was a deep look into one woman's experience, Anna. I think what this book needed was a focus, while we want to touch on every female issue - because there are so many - there can be too many all at once disrupting the flow of the novel. I thought the concept was interesting, with how digital the world is, it's important that we have these conversations and share them through literature. While I wouldn't read this again, I still think the book spoke about a lot of important things such as: pregnancy, abortion, sexuality, etc.

Let me preface this review with this: This book comes with a plethora of content warnings -child pornography, bullying, and rape. It deals with some very heavy topics.

The story starts out with Anna moving to a new town following a mysterious incident at her previous school. We aren’t quite sure what has happened, but we can guess it’s pretty bad. She is also struggling with the recent loss of her father.

Throughout the story we get a sense of the immense pain Anna is going through as she tries to make a place for herself in her new school. When she’s assigned a project to research the local history, she discovers Maggie – a woman accused of witchcraft in the seventeenth century. The parallels between Anna and Maggie’s stories become more evident as we learn more about each girl’s past. There are a lot of heavy topics to unpack in this story, but I think it’s a fairly decent depiction of the struggles of modern life and how women were treated in the past.

It’s not all heavy though! We get to see Anna make new friends and relationships along the way. There’s also a really lovely bit of character development for Anna’s mother.

I really enjoyed this story.

I could not finish this book.
I found myself bored through what I did read.
The plot seems to start out really slow to the point where I just couldn’t keep going.

Unfortunately this was not the right book for me and I ended up DNFing at 30%. It's probably a simple case of it not being for me. Thanks very much to Netgalley and the publisher.

I tried and tried to get into this book, and I just couldn't. It seemed to go slow, and I wasn't engaged by the characters. I was really looking forward to this book, and I'm disappointed that it didn't turn out to work for me.