Have had this book on my reading list for some time and I wish I had read it sooner. An interesting sort of murder/mystery where one is never 100% sure of who has done what to whom until the finale. I know that is the plan but one frequently guesses who some of the bad guys are. For me this was not one of those stories. It was a mystery to the end.

Certainly worth your time and effort to read as it has some nice twists to the tale. It will be even more enjoyable if you are able to curl up somewhere undisturbed and warm to read it - in front of an open fire would be just perfect.

Bonfire is a slow-burner, a mystery novel with heaps of suspense and all the hallmarks of a thriller without the usual breakneck pace. The story focuses on Abby, a young woman returning to her childhood town for the first time in years. 

Barrens is the perfect small-town setting for this novel, and its residents are just as curious as the town itself. While Abby has gone away, grown up, and carved out a life for herself away from Barrens, the town seems to have got stuck in a rut, with little progress beyond ever-increasing reliance on the shady Optimal Plastics business. This makes the perfect premise for a novel, and the story certainly does not disappoint. 

As Bonfire advances, the story digs deeper and deeper into Abby's past - driven partly by the investigation, and partly by her own desire to finally overcome her own issues with Barrens. It's a thrilling and exciting story, yet is told in a slow, suspenseful way. The senses heighten with each page, drawing you even deeper into the story.

The pace picks up as the story draws towards its conclusion, matching Abby's increasingly desperate attempts to uncover Barrens' secrets. It's full of twists and turns that you won't see coming, plus more than its fair share of excitement at the end! 

Bonfire is a captivating story of one woman's quest to overcome her childhood ghosts and finally uncover the mysteries of one small, American town.

Bonfire - Krysten Ritter

I was given a copy of this book in exchange for a fair review thanks to Random House and Netgalley. 

I was skeptical about this book as it is written by Krysten Ritter. I was worried that the hype would be for the wrong reason. However, given that I read this book in less than 24 hours I feel that the hype was justified.

Abby Williams returns to her childhood town of Barrens as an environmental lawyer investigating Optimal Plastics, the area’s largest employer. 

Whilst the story focuses on the investigation into Optimal Plastics, there are flashbacks to Abby’s past. She also becomes fixated on finding out what happened to Kaycee Mitchell. 

If you are a fan of mysteries and thrillers then I would recommend that you check out this book if you haven’t already. 

Rating: 4/5 
I look forward to see what else Krysten writes.

I will definitely be reading this again. I’ll be looking forward to more books to come from this author.

It took me a while to get into this but once I did, I couldn't put it down. This was such an incredible debut and I look forward to reading more from Ritter. Bonfire left a long lasting impression on me

This was really good!! thoroughly enjoyed it. The writing style was right up my alley and the plot was very interesting

This was a fairly typical murder mystery book. I felt as though I’d read the story before. It seemed like an attempt at Gillian Flynn

I'll admit it, I expected this to be another lightweight celebrity novel, probably ghostwritten and only published because they're famous. But this was a real surprise: absorbing, pitch-black and beautifully written. I'd be surprised if film rights haven't already been sold – with Ritter in the lead role, I hope.

I received a copy from Netgalley.

I snagged this one when it was offered on a read it now for the first 100 members. I take a break from the YA I read for grown up mysteries and thrillers, this one sounded good and the fact it was written by Krysten Ritter caught my attention immediately.

Unfortunately, I just didn’t like this book. The story has been done before in one form or another, there wasn’t any particular character I necessarily liked. Most of them were horrible people. The story line was interesting enough – a small town girl leaves and goes to college, becomes a lawyer and winds up working for a centre for legal advocacy. Something to do with environmental law. Finds herself returning home to investigate a big company who make plastic and give the dying town new life and new employment opportunities. With some nasty side effects to the environment and some of the people who live there. 

Nothing unfamiliar. The main character fell fowl of the school’s mean girls. The most popular one who used to be a childhood best friend turned toxic became the queen bee and disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Some sort of sinister Game is hinted at, to do with risqué pictures and blackmail and a whole host of perverted things related to it. There’s something going on and may be related to things that happened when the MC went to high school there, only things have taken a significantly darker turn. And of course there are people who don’t want the past digging up or the MC to connect the dots to what’s really happening. 

Technically speaking there wasn’t anything terrible about the way it was written – it had its moment and really managed to capture the small dull life of a town without much going for it. The novel did a pretty good job of showing how horrible people can be behind the smiling facades they put on. Girls who were bullies in high school that don’t learn from it and don’t become good people.  The main character is reasonably level headed and intelligent and the investigation is interesting enough that it kept me wanting to know what was going on. One or two characters had some redeeming moments, but for the most part, nothing stood out. 

Overall, it was just okay. 

Thank you to Random House UK, Cornerstone for the review copy.

This was an interesting enough story of big company greed (and worse) in small town America.
I enjoyed reading it, but it did drag a bit.

A fantastic read. Thoroughly enjoyed this and it is not something I would usually pick up. Will look for more from this author in future.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.  This review is spoiler-free.


So to get this out of the way: yes, this book is written by the marvelous Krysten Ritter.  I really like her as an actress and am a huge fan of Jessica Jones. I will be very honest, I was very curious about this book based on who she is -- I'm not sure it's one I would have picked up on my own in a bookstore.  However, while I don’t read a lot of thrillers, it’s a genre I’d love to get into and this seemed like a great fit. 

I enjoyed Bonfire, but I really think that her star power did help get it published.  This is a book that had great potential, but fell flat. If she had been a ‘regular’ person, I think that her author or agent would have taken more time to develop the story into something great.  While the bones of a good thriller were there, Bonfire was just okay.

The main issue is that Bonfire couldn’t figure out what it was.  Was it an environmental thriller with a kickass lawyer as a heroine? Was it another Girl on the Train that featured a twisted tale and an unreliable narrator?  Or was it the story of a woman dredging up her secretive past? It had elements of all three, but it didn’t really commit to any and I think the book really suffered because of this. 

Abby, our narrator, was supposed to be this big-city lawyer coming back home to shake things up, but she hardly did any lawyering. I really wanted her to be a razor-sharp legal mind, and while she you get an understanding of some of her legal prowess I just didn’t find her impressive in this sense.  Her career as a lawyer served more as a plot device to get her back to her hometown than anything else. The most interesting part of the book was Abby's return to her hometwon.  She must answer the haunting question that has been haunting her since childhood -- what happened to Kaycee Mitchell?  I really enjoyed her digging up secrets from the past and how those secrets related to the present.  I also really liked her return to the hometown that she has been trying to run from.  Funny enough, her career as a lawyer just got in the way of these much more fascinating plot elements. The story probably would have worked better if her career as a lawyer had been cut.

The story itself was interesting enough, but I didn’t find it particularly intriguing.  For me, there wasn’t a huge twist or surprise in the plot. It pretty much played out exactly as I expected it to, although I didn’t guess the exact details.  It was all a bit underwhelming, and I found that I just didn't care about her investigation into Optimal Plastics.  I wanted to know more about Abby's past and the way it has affected her life.

Despite all this, I see real potential in Ritter’s writing.  I powered through Bonfire in only a few sittings and found it entertaining.  It’s a fun and fluffy book (if a dark book can be fluffy) to pick up from the library if you’re on holiday in the summer.  It has an interesting and imperfect female lead and reads very quickly -- just don’t expect anything gripping and groundbreaking.


CW: bullying, slut shaming, suicide, off-screen abuse

This review will go live on 07 June 2018

Recommended: For the nights you randomly woke up on.
Reading time: Three or four hours should do it. Perfect to binge on.
Suggested: Watch Jessica Jones before or after. Just cuz it's awesome.

The problem with authors you know- or you think you know- is that you start to try to find underlying meanings in their works and try to connect in back to what you know about them in real life. Having watched Jessica Jones, it's not difficult to instantly start drawing parallels between the protagonists. It's involuntary as it's effortless; both are loners who want to forget their families and have no present "ties" to speak of. Both crave the sense of belonging. But no, I digress.
Other than this and fact that I read all of the narration in Krysten Ritter's voice, her debut novel is nothing short of a masterpiece. It leaves you constantly second guessing not just your own judgement, but also that of our protagonist- environmental lawyer turned compulsive detective- Abigail Williams. You don't trust others in the beginning. But by the end, you realise all that you have been basing your inferences on- Abigail's recollections of bad, horrific high school incidents- are not the holy grail either.
The writing is easy to devour in a single sitting- you just have to keep going on. This novel is an expert telling of how twisted the human mind can get. And surviving high school takes on a whole new meaning. Long story short, there was nothing Krysten Ritter could have done to better portray the fragility and volatility of human emotions and how our past isn't something static. It comes back to the future and shows itself to be ever-changing.

Honestly, I requested this mostly because of its author. I really liked Krysten Ritter in JESSICA JONES and I wanted to see if she would be one of those actresses who can branch out into other media and still be good. Answer? Yes!

This thriller takes a lot of the tropes you expect from similar novels and throws them away. And the tropes it does keep are executed quite well. The small-town mentality, for one, is so realistic (Abby's not been to her hometown in 10 years, but everyone she went to school with remembers her).

There was a really interesting focus on environmental law which made a change to see - this wasn't your usual thriller where somebody is murdered and the MC is investigating - the investigation is centred around Optimal Plastics, the company that essentially runs the small town of Barrens, Indiana. There's a really interesting sub-plot as well, which features Abby's childhood bully, Kaycee, and her band of friends.

This is definitely a gritty, fast-paced thriller. Don't let the celebrity name on the cover put you off.

For a first book, it is very well written and I have heard good things from other people before reading this. An enjoyable thriller

Bonfire starts with Abby returning to her hometown of Barrens. Abby is now working for an environmental advocacy firm and is returning to Barrens to see if the town’s main employer, Optimal, is polluting the town’s water.

Abby is still dealing with a lot of trauma from her childhood. After leaving Barrens ten years ago, she never had plans to return. Throughout the story, it is almost like she has been drawn back to solve a mystery that has been haunting her. Like any story about returning home, Abby is running into old adversaries, who are now acting like they want to be her friends. Abby’s memories of the past are coming fast and furious and she can’t shake the feeling that some of these people are trying to get into her head.

Misha the most violent of Abby’s bullies is now the vice principal at their old high school. Misha seems genuinely happy to see Abby and whilst reminiscing about the past, Misha seems to blame her previous behaviour on Kaycee Mitchell. Kaycee is one of those people whose behaviour impacts the people around them, but Kaycee ran away a long time ago, so Abby has to decide whether Kaycee’s actions are still causing repercussions ten years later.

For Abby, there is a lot of uncertainty as to what happened to Kaycee and herself, with lots of memories resurfacing, including an event that in its retelling seems to be reminiscent of The Crucible, when a group of teenage girls led by Kaycee start displaying symptoms of a mysterious illness. Abby has to decide whether Kaycee was really ill or as it was cleared up at the time that the girls were they all faking their symptoms for attention?

Abby has multiple issues to deal with, including finding out if there is a case to bring against Optimal. Abby also has to confront her family issues and work out if there is more to Kaycee’s last days in Barrens than she previously thought. There is also the fact that Abby is now seen as an outsider in the small town and not many people are happy to see her investigating Optimal when they are so tied to the town.

Conspiracies come thick and fast, and we are left questioning whether these are Abby’s imagination or if the town’s resurgence is due to a dark and well-hidden secret that not only resonates with the past but is being enacted in the present. Trust is a theme that is repeated over and over again, with revelations about people you would generally expect to be able to rely on, being turned on there head.

Abby is a great character who strove to break away from her past but is also haunted by it. Abby herself is a broken person, who self-medicates with alcohol which contributes to Abby’s compulsive, obsessive behaviour. Abby is so driven to get to the truth that she burns a lot of bridges with not only the people she works with but also potential allies. Abby makes a lot of missteps that, but this makes Bonfire a more compelling read, as you aren’t sure if the book is about one woman’s spiral into madness, or if Optimal is exactly the kind of corporation that would put profits over people’s safety.

Bonfire has so many heartbreaking secrets, as well as a lot of contemporary themes. The book switches between the corporate storyline of getting a case together and the personal. Although it feels at times like we are following Abby’s personal crusade, it also becomes that of the characters she interacts with. This is a much larger story than the awkward girl who made good, this is a story of what you are willing to sacrifice to understand your past.

Bonfire

Bonfire is a story of a young woman who left her hometown of Barrens years ago to get away from the cruel people who lived there. She was bullied at school and mentally abused by her mean god fearing father and promised to escape when she could and not come back. 

However she gets involved in a case at work investigating the water source of the small town and illnesses that are being experienced by some residents from the town. The suspected cause of the water contamination is a big corporation Optimal Plastics in the town that is responsible for many of the residents work and pumps a lot of money to the poor community. Abby soon has a feeling that there is a cover-up and works to discover the cause of the contamination while dealing with a past that she would rather forget. 

I enjoyed reading this but had guessed early on in the story the main criminals so it wasn’t much of a surprise how the ending panned out. I cannot say that there is anything about this novel that stood out for me a ground breaking but it was an ok read.

Fine but not fantastic.
The story was mostly interesting, the writing was quite good, but the twist wasn't exactly surprising and I was slightly off-put by the title telling me that it was 'from the star of...'.

This is an impressive debut, a solid 3.5 star read, and it doesn't matter a jot who the author is - although, yes, I did start off with Jessica Jones playing the main character! I enjoyed the claustrophobic feel of the story, of a lawyer going back to the small town she grew up in - and escaped from - to try an gather evidence in a pollution case against the town's big employer. There's definitely familiarity to the story line, but it's done well with a few twists and turns, although I did think the ending could have had a little more punch.

Oooh, Krysten Ritter - you know, the woman who plays Jessica Jones - has written a book. A proper one too, not a memoir or celeb tell-all. Oooh, it sounds gritty too. Like how she comes across on screen. Oooh. I'm excited! I bet it's going to be really good!

Except... it really isn't. I mean, it's certainly not the worst thing I've ever read, but it's definitely not a future classic. Sorry Krysten.

The novel begins when the main protagonist Abby goes back to her small hometown to look at a number of complaints from local people about getting ill, purportedly from a chemical leak into the water supply. There's a big shady company who have potentially caused the problem who basically employ the whole town, so she finds it difficult to get anyone to talk to her. She also has memories of similar issues happening when she was a teenager to some of the girls from her school. As Abby gets pulled back into her former life, she realises that old loyalties die hard and the further she digs, the worse her discoveries become. 

So basically, Erin Brockovich?

Well, fictional italics person, I haven't seen that film but a quick squiz at IMDB 

suggests yeah, it's basically the same story. Oh, except there's another layer of corruption in Bonfire, which is a good job because *insignificant spoiler alert* this is how the potential water contamination is handled: 

(Abby) "Let's get a water sample and screen it."

(Guy she works with) "We got the results back from the lab. The water is totally polluted."

So...yeah. 

To me, this felt like a really clunky way to get into the main mystery. I would have liked to see faked lab tests, some kind of corruption to stop the results being published...anything to stop this section of the story being such a boring dead end. Or at least if the book had started with this discovery it would have been a good lead in to the actual story, not just a weird aside that felt like a total let down.

The characters in the book were kind of thin - because the whole town is implicated and most characters are white straight men it's kind of hard to remember the difference between David, Paul, Ryan, Chris, (insert boring white guy name) etc. I also didn't feel like we found out who exactly knew what and I hate hate hate stories that aren't fully resolved.

I expected Abby to be a super kick-ass main character but unfortunately she was a total let down. She spent much of the book smashed off her face (because issues) which presumably made it hard for her to work anything out - twice in the book major advancements in the case are made and both times the people who do so are members of Abby's team. She constantly gets things wrong and needs rescuing by men, which kind of grates after a while. To be honest, I'm getting a bit sick of seeing characters who drink themselves into oblivion then go to work as normal the next day, seemingly with no ill effects. This isn't normal, it's not sustainable long term, it's not something that wouldn't get you fired pretty quickly. Please stop glamorizing it.

Also the ending is shit.

Overall, a bit of a let down all round. Fairly unlikeable characters, a weird segway part way through, a romance I was not on board with. Not terrible, just meh.