We Burned So Bright May Be TJ Klune's Best Book Yet (book review)

GENRE: Adult Sci-fi/Speculative Fiction

LENGTH: 163 pages

PLOT

The world is going to be swallowed up by a rogue black hole. Don and Rodney, an elderly married couple, embark on a road trip to take care of unfinished business before the end comes for everyone.

CHARACTERS

One of my concerns with this novella being so short was that there wouldn’t be time to develop the characters. Undercooked characters are ones that are subsequently more difficult to grow any sort of attachment towards as a reader. I should have had more faith in Klune, however, because I found myself becoming very emotional over these characters and their fates.

Don and Rodney are the characters we’re directly following and the ones we learn the most about. Their dynamic that we are privy to is one that has been built over sharing a life together for 40 years. We get glimpses of their past struggles and I especially liked a scene where they are talking to a younger lesbian couple. Having an elder couple as the main characters gave Klune an opportunity to discuss the battles the LGBT+ community has faced throughout history.

Besides Don and Rodney, we get to meet multiple other characters they encounter on their road trip. There is a young family with two children, a group of hippies, a young girl from a farm, the young lesbian couple, and a lone woman and her dog. Each of these characters’ behaviors and beliefs showcases a different reaction to their impending doom. Each one added something to the story and allowed Klune to explore the spectrum of human behavior. Some characters were endearing and some were frightening, but all we’re so uniquely HUMAN.

There’s one final character I can’t really talk about here without spoiling a big part of the novella. What I can say is it deals with a character with mental illness. I’ve always striven to be open on this blog in terms of discussing my own journey with mental illness and how important I believe it is to see good representation in stories. Reading the acknowledgments, Klune shares that he has a loved one who suffers from the same mental illness as this character. I have always found it be quite obvious, in a positive way, when a writer has personal experience or a loved one with the mental illness they’re writing about. They write about it in ways that are real and raw but don’t villainize the character – there’s an empathy there. I feel some writers forget that their fictional people represent real people, but every character in this story feels like they could be a real, breathing person.

WRITING

I first fell in love with Klune as a cozy, found family fantasy writer. Tonally, book is quite the departure from those stories to the point that some readers may find it jarring. There is no traditional happy ending to Don and Rodney’s story. The novella ends with what is promised at its start – the end of the world. This isn’t a typical apocalyptic story that tells a story of a fight for survival or a desperate, last ditch effort to save humanity. Instead, the novella is more of a reflection both of Don and Rodney’s life together and also of humanity as a whole. We see how the end of the world has torn people apart, but also how it has brought them together.

My favorite thing about how this story is written is that we are left in the dark about the reason behind Don and Rodney’s road trip. We can slowly surmise based on context clues what their goal is, but we don’t get confirmation until near the end. This brilliantly mirrors the way that Don and Rodney have spent years living around this bad thing that happened. They have kept their true feelings repressed, even from each other. Ironically, it isn’t until the end of the world that they are finally able to find closure.

I believe the title likely references a quote in the novella - "Some people have black holes in them. Burns everything until there's nothing left but ashes." (page 78). In my opinion, however, it more so represents the history of our species - all that we've created and destroyed, loved and hated - for all of our good and our bad, we are/were vibrant and alive. We’ve burned brightly.  

TRIGGER WARNINGS for suicide, drug use, death, fire, gun violence, car accident, child abuse, mental illness

FINAL THOUGHTS

This novella was a harrowing read. For something so short, I know it will stay with me for some time. I became attached to the characters we met, even the ones we knew just briefly. I don't typically read apocalyptic stories, but I made an exception for Klune. I read in an interview that he wrote this in 3 weeks, which is wild to me because it's some of his best work. What a tragically beautiful experience reading this was, just like it is to be human.

FINAL RATING: 5⭐️