It’s actually been a couple of weeks since I finished The Last Thing To Burn. Usually, I review a book quite soon after I finish it. The Last Thing to Burn left an impression on me. It’s a tense, dark and utterly gripping book that, despite its short length, will make you feel like you’ve been on a journey with the main character.
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The Last Thing to Burn is a book about a woman called “Jane” the name her “husband” has given her and her fight to get loose from her cruel husband’s slavery he has her under. It’s a tense and claustrophobic book that will have you flipping pages at a rate of knots! But why is it so good?
The Last Thing to Burn plot – 4.5/5
In The Last Thing to Burn, a woman is trapped in a house where her “husband” is keeping her. The house is on an isolated farm in the middle of nowhere and the man she lives with won’t let her leave. He makes her do repetitive tasks and if he ever sees or catches her trying t escape or doing anything against these orders, he burns one of her possessions. She’s slowly losing possessions and then she becomes pregnant and everything changes!
It’s a plotline that will grab you by the collar and keep you close throughout. It is utterly gripping and enthralling. There was one night when I literally could not stop reading. I was so immersed in the story and rooting for the main character that I could not go to sleep without knowing how it all finished.
Will Dean has written The Last Thing to Burn in such a way where it’s tense, it’s repetitive but it drills home just how horrible this woman’s life is. When things start to move quicker, you can feel your heart genuinely speeding up.
The Last Thing to Burn characters 5/5
I hated Lenn in The Last Thing to Burn. Lenn is the man keeping calling Thanh (whom he calls Jane) captive. He has chores set out for her to make her the “perfect housewife”. However, she’s living a life with one foot that barely works after he smashed it after she tried to escape. He’s stupid, he’s cruel and he is almost certainly a psychopath. To make a reader despise someone as much as I despised Lenn without making them seem unrealistic is quite an impressive feat, Mr Dean.
Thanh is from whose eyes see nearly all of the story She’s a woman is at her very lowest. She doesn’t want to live with this horrible man and she doesn’t want to do his tasks. But after being taken away from her family and being left with only a few precious possessions, which he’ll burn if she steps out of line, she can’t afford to do anything else but live this miserable life.
She does push the boundaries and request things from him every now and then and when something big happens about halfway through, everything changes and it gives her drive to escape properly this time. As I said above, I was rooting for Thanh throughout the whole book, willing her to keep going, wanting to see where the book was going next. Dean kept me hooked with the plot and a character I genuinely wanted to escape.
The Last Thing to Burn by Will Dean overall rating – 5/5
I’m not quite sure the last thing I stayed up late to read a book like this. I don’t think there’s ever been a time when I stayed up late but still felt the need to finish it so bought the audiobook just to listen to the final pages as I wound down for sleep. The Last Thing to Burn is tense, encapsulating and all-encompassing. There are a lot of tense and uncomfortable moments but these all add up to create an emotional rollercoaster ride of a book.
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