Nothing Burns as Bright as You

This novel-in-verse really captures a way young teenage love can be. Wild, desperate, feeling like the most important thing ever, like the whole universe is two people and everything else can burn down. Everything is short term goals, the feeling of tonight, of right now. Missing the red flags from their partner. Missing the red flags in their own actions. Woodfolk carries a number of motifs and imagery throughout the novel. These can be grouped into opposites and paradoxes. Opposites like water and fire, safety and danger. Paradoxes like fully loving someone and not being able to call them yours; knowing someone so well and yet them remaining unknowable; and loving the promise of something valued above the reality of actually getting it. If you think about the ending in a literal fashion, it’s so frustrating. What is going to happen to them? They are in serious ducking trouble, and I’m so worried about the consequences. But I think if you think about the ending in a more poetic fashion, it’s the final crescendo. The severing of ties is the emotional ending, the only ending that makes sense. “These violent delights have violent ends” sort of thing. I think the book is better read as a series of emotions than as plot and consequences. I’m probably gonna go back and forth on how to rate this. For now, I’m giving it a 7.5/10.