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By Maggie Martin Dec 3, 2013
The Burning Song by L.J. Billingsley
As an aspiring author myself I am always amazed and inspired by local authors who are publishing (and writing brilliant things!) in good ol’ Iowa. Today I bring you a review of an awesome book by Des Moines-area author L.J. Billingsley called The Burning Song which you can download on Kindle or Nook for a whopping $2.99. Totally worth it.
In Beth’s world society is broken into castes of numbers ranging from One to Twenty. If you are a One you live underground in the mines doing physical labor while the Nineteens and the Highest, Twenty, live lives of luxury above ground leading the masses. The world is no longer habitable after dangerous sun radiation scorched the earth. The remaining humans live inside three terrariums, essentially radiation-proof bubbles of life, or deep underground.
Beth’s family is ranked as sevens which means they cultivate plants inside the terrarium but live underground with the other lower numbers. At the age of ten the people in their society take a test to see which number they are and Beth is placed as a number Four, demoted to cleaning. While she is cleaning one of the Higher Ups’ offices one day, she discovers an invitation to the Solstice Party which changes her perception of their society forever.
That night her home is raided and a mysterious man tells her that her assigned number was wrong—that she is supposed to be placed higher but her test was sabotaged in order to keep her in with the lower ranks as a rebel spy. They call themselves the Zeros. And that is only the start of her questioning the society she lives in and what the world was like before the Earth burned.
I loved the world-building in this novel. Billingsley obviously spent an enormous amount of time detailing everything that would happen if the sun destroyed the planet. Each small detail was a treasure to read and I felt like I was a part of the world thirty pages in.
That being said, the pace was a little slow from the start. But, once you get past the initial details, it is worth it. Beth is a character who comes to realize her worth over time and grows into a strong leader triumphantly in the end. That’s what I look for in a YA heroine.
Probably what I enjoyed most about the novel were the eccentric characters that were incredibly unique to this story. While the dystopian YA genre has many recycled character arcs, The Burning Song was unique in that it focused on her discoveries and finding herself as opposed to being wrapped up in an all-consuming romance. It was refreshing.
Like most Dystopians, the connections between the fictional and reality were easy to draw—the wealthy legitimately trapping the poor underground, unable to break through a physical barrier being the most vivid in The Burning Song. In the same way Suzanne Collins asked us to observe the wealth and spectacle of The Capitol, Billingsley forces us to correlate vanity and oppression in the Higher Ups and compare them to contemporary society. As Billingsley said in one of her blogs, the reason we are drawn to Dystopian is because “focusing on a group of people in a strange or broken-down social system allows for a clearer view of societal problems that impact us all.”
Then end left me wanting more with huge questions left to be answered. Cannot wait for the second installment.
5/5 stars
