"We know only enough of our own cells to know they speak a language we can't hear. How our atoms slacken and slide out of tune. How they slip past one another, the slightest of friction. How they whisper insurrection. How they articulate in flame what we leave behind."

This book was dark. Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down is about a high school in St. Louis dealing with the ramifications of a school shooting that took 28 students from them, and the impossible task that four students face in creating a yearbook that no one is going to want to read. In the wake of this disaster, the town's grief is only piled upon when the houses of the families who lost a child begin to burn to the ground. It's a "story of grief, community, and family, of the search for understanding and normalcy in the wake of devastating loss, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down explore profound questions about resiliency, memory, and recovery that brilliantly illuminate the deepest recesses of the human heart."

That last bit makes this book sound very intense, and let me tell you it lives up to every ounce of that. There was no reprieve, no respite from the grief, from the darkness, from the fear and anxiety and tragedy that pervades every page of this book. I would be hard pressed to believe that the author, Anne Valente, had not experienced loss and tragedy of her own. She knows too intimately the feeling of it, the way it colors everything, the atmosphere it creates. She does a superb job of communicating that feeling to the reader, of putting them right in the thick of it, of using words to communicate far more than words seem they could. 

I was waiting through the whole book for a glimmer of hope; for resolution that I'm sad to say never came. Though the ending was surprising and befitting of the title, I had wished for more closure. I suppose that wishing for that is fitting and adds another layer to the reading experience. And it is just that, an experience. Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down keeps you turning pages. I don't know if it is just our own curiosity, sick as it is, to get into the minds of shooters and arsonists, but we always need to know why and I think that is the main driving force behind our need to keep reading. Very well executed, in every sense. Even down to the last two pages, which were filled with poetic introspection and comments about the human condition, which I always appreciate.

p.s. The f-bomb count was somewhere in the mid-sixties and there was a fair bit of other curses used as well. There were two detailed sex scenes and one scene where a girl induces an orgasm for herself in the bathtub. You can bet I skipped over those.

Thank you HarperCollins for sending a copy of this my way!!