Burning Bright

”She didn’t wonder where he’d gone, or how long it would be before he came back. She was unsuspicious. You can’t get it back once it’s gone, that stupor of trust.” (page 110)

Helen Dunmore won the Orange Prize for A Spell of Winter which is one of the creepiest books I can remember reading. Burning Bright, her second novel, is right up there now. Throughout my read, I was accompanied by a sense of foreboding and gently increasing tension as the story of a sixteen year old girl, her older boyfriend, and an old lady unfolded. The perspective and narrative shift constantly, sometimes within the same chapter, and it was difficult to establish a connection with any of the characters. They are all flawed in some way (some more than show more others), but this story of loss of innocence and establishment of personal identity was very compelling in its own quiet way. 3.75 stars show less

I didn't really feel like this hung together well as a book. I really enjoyed the Enid back story and could have read a whole book of that easily, but found the Nadine story less convincing and less compelling.

This is the fourth Helen Dunmore I’ve read and I’m still waiting for one that lives up to the excellent ‘The Siege’. To give this one its due, it has a more dramatic plot than many of her others if you boil it down to its essence, but there is the usual literary padding that separates the main events and makes it much less nail biting than it might have been in the hands of a different author.

Point of view is handled in an unconventional manner – changing from one character to another within a single section. At one point a character seems to hi-jack the narrative, moving from third person to first person without a section break, ‘she’ suddenly becoming ‘I’. That’s the sort of thing that would have an amateur author show more sent back to school but if you’re Helen Dunmore you can do as you please!

I found so many questions floating around my head as I was reading it. Where was the house situated? (the blurb suggests London, but it seemed not). Was Nadine really 16? Her thought processes and analysis of events felt like those of a much older person. And was the Finnish character only Finnish in order to exercise the author’s undeniable knowledge of that country?

I’m always surprised, but perhaps shouldn’t be, that older characters are often the best in books. So it was with this one. Enid the sitting tenant with experimental tastes and an interesting past, was one of the two major plus points of the book for me. The other was the way I was never sure which direction the story was heading, a fact that kept me reading through the less eventful sections. show less

Helen Dunmore is an excellent story teller. In this novel, Nadine, a naive 16-year-old is groomed by Kai, an older Finnish guy and Tony, his business partner. The story centres on the house into which the 3 move and Enid, it's elderly sitting tenant. As Enid and Nadine strike up a relationship, things start to unravel.

I had been warned that Burning Bright was not Helen Dunmore's best novel, but wanted to read something by this author after she died. The book was on the shelf, so...

I confess that I just didn't get it and was left with the impression that Dunmore had started writing this novel with no clear idea of where it would go or how it would end. The story concerns Nadine, a teenager somewhat implausibly left behind by her family when it moves to Germany and now being groomed by Tony and Kai; and Enid, an old woman looking back on a relationship with another woman in the 1930s. Neither strand is particularly interesting; the author spends too much time on unnecessary detail, and the whole novel felt plodding and flat.

For Helen Dunmore fans only, show more perhaps. show less

Beautifully written. Resonates long after reading it.

Een 16-jarig meisje raakt verstrikt in een wereld van prostitutie en geweld, maar slaagt er met hulp van een oude vrouw in een nieuw leven op te bouwen