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Analyzing the Craft of Kat Ellis’s “Burden Falls”

Kat Ellis’s Burden Falls is a master class in how one can use point of view to create suspense and intimacy with a character. Burden Falls follows Ava Thorn, the last daughter of the Thorn family, as she attempts to solve the mystery surrounding the deaths of a classmate, Freya, and her best friend Ford. Ava also has to deal with the ever-present threat of Dead-Eye Sadie, a ghost that supposedly haunts the Thorn Estate.

Ellis utilizes a first-person, present tense point of view, allowing Ava to interject her own thoughts at several points throughout the novel. This especially becomes poignant when Ava begins to hallucinate things that aren’t actually there—people walking outside her bedroom door, Freya’s eyeless corpse sitting in the passenger seat of the school counselor’s car, and the scars on her hands opening up to reveal eyes beneath them. “The scar opens, edges parting to reveal a pocket in the flesh. Then another scar opens, and another….They almost look like…Eye sockets” (261). These moments of intense hallucination become grounded in Ava’s reality, as even this discussion of the scars opening to show “eye sockets” fit with Ava’s obsession with not only Dead-Eye Sadie but also the evil eyes that pock the entirety of Burden Falls.

Ellis’s choice for a first-person, present tense point of view also creates a heightened sense of urgency with each death that Ava encounters. When she discovers Freya’s body in the pavilion, Ellis’s handling of the point of view makes the discovery horrifying. “[Freya] just sits there with her dead eyes, her pale hands in her lap like she’s waiting for something. Her dead…” (113). The urgency that the first-person present tense point of view gives the readers makes the mystery seem far more dangerous to Ava as the story progresses.

However, where Ellis’s use of point of view really shines is when one of the plot twists reveals itself to readers. Readers are informed that Ava has actually been drugged by Freya and Ford’s murderer, meaning that each of the hallucinations that Ava faced throughout the novel weren’t manifestations of Ava’s trauma but rather a side-effect of the drugs that they had been microdosing her with. Readers get several hints throughout the novel that something is off, as Ava mentions that her coffee is bitter, but it isn’t until later on that readers get this interesting line: “[The coffee] is creamy and sweet, but without the bitter afternote I’m used to” (247). Ellis keeps the readers’ view so intensely on Ava’s experiences that at first read this may be attributed to Ava spending time with her love interest, but upon second read through, the actual reason for this line’s inclusion becomes clearer.

Burden Falls provides an interesting take on the mystery YA genre by adding a supernatural twist to it. Without Ellis’s careful use of point of view and the intimacy we as readers get following Ava before the plot twist, many of the more horrifying moments of the novel would be watered down, and the gut punch plot twist would not have been as impactful.

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“The Last Garden in England” by Julia Kelly: Marketing Analysis

The Last Garden in England by Julia Kelly follows the lives of five women working in Highbury House: Venetia Smith, the gardener extraordinaire in 1907; Emma Lovett, a twenty-first century Smith devotee attempting to restore Smith’s original designs; Beth Pedley, a land girl laboring on the Highbury estate in 1944; Cook Stella Adderton, a woman attempting to leave Highbury house in the past; and Diana Symonds, a World War II widow desperately trying to keep Highbury House alive in her memory as it is turned into a field hospital. The Last Garden in England was marketed and published by Simon and Shuster.

Most of the marketing for The Last Garden in England was done online; several reviewers on GoogleBooks and GoodReads mentioned that they were gifted Advanced Reader Copies for the purposes of reviewing. Aside from that, due to the COVID-19 restrictions facing the publishing world in January 2021, most of the online marketing focused on Kelly’s previously published works to help elevate The Last Garden into the public spotlight. Kelly is known for her other works (most notably The Light Over London, The Whispers of War, and several other works of women’s fiction and romance), and many of the tweets, summaries, and reviews highlight and compare The Last Garden to Kelly’s other works. But aside from these small asides, the overall marketing campaign for The Last Garden seems to have been short-lived and non-expansive—Kelly did complete a small virtual book tour for The Last Garden by completing readings on Instagram Live, an interview with Warwick’s Couch Surfing Book Tour, and several other smaller virtual installments through regularly Facebook interviews (which are still ongoing at the time). The Last Garden has also seen success through its features on Twitter through its mention on CNN’s most anticipated books of January list and, while not an American source, its mention in the Toronto Star. Kelly also had the opportunity to share thoughts with other sources, notably Writer’s Digest and BookBub, which enabled The Last Garden to continue to reach reviewers and prospective readers alike.

Overall, the book has received positive praise from readers on GoodReads and GoogleBooks, with GoodReads giving The Last Garden a 4/5, praising the strong characters and plotlines in the novel. Many reviewers echoed the same curiosity I had while reading, discussing the locked garden in Highbury Estate that for much of the novel serves as an enigma for the reader to piece together as all five women interact with Highbury House’s garden, lending new perspectives to each storyline as the novel progresses. As a reader with an interest in temporal manipulation (and multiple storylines) in novels, I concur with many of the reviewers’ discussions on Kelly’s expert handling of all five point of view characters. However, while this book does contain some of Kelly’s trademarks, such as an underlying romance plot as well as the primary female protagonists, some readers felt alienated by The Last Garden by its execution. With its heavy emphasis on gardening and the temporal jumps, a reader could easily find themselves lost, even in the middle of Kelly’s great (if sometimes overly flowery, pun intended) descriptions of the various gardens at Highbury House. Several reviewers on GoodReads mentioned this as a detracting point in Kelly’s work, which goes to show that even with the marketing strategies employed by Kelly to push this book forward, even the intended audience struggled at times to connect to the various situations presented in The Last Garden. I myself felt some of the same disconnect for the first quarter of the novel; while I was thoroughly engrossed by the mystery of the Winter Garden at Highbury, it took until just after the quarter mark for the connections between the characters to fully solidify in my reader’s mind and to fully understand where the novel was leading readers.

Kelly’s original premise and the marketing surrounding The Last Garden seem to have been an overall success, based on reviews given for this particular book. The niche audience for this book—both readers of historical fiction, women’s fiction, and those with particular interest in both nature and gardening would have been the ideal target audience—seems to have been a particular boon for this novel’s success. Nearly all the reviewers rave about the premise, especially one so heavily focused on a garden’s history—in place of say a house, a town, or other historical landmark—being so original, and that due to the novel’s originality it’s a worthwhile read for those outside the intended target audience. I think part of this is true, but the novel and Kelly herself really capitalize on the use of online marketing; a quick glance through the author’s website and her event page shows that she nearly always has some kind of interview lined up, giving readers the opportunity to not only connect with her but also to ask questions, an excellent marketing strategy.  

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Analyzing the Craft of Marlon James’s “Black Leopard, Red Wolf”

Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James pushes fantasy in a new direction. BLRW’s non-linear storytelling of Tracker’s hunt to find the boy at first seems to set Tracker up as an unreliable narrator. At one point, during one of the first inquisitor chapters, the inquisitor writes that “I […] seek to break his untruth by asking him to tell a different part of the tale” (Marlon 15). But as the book progresses and readers are drawn deeper into Tracker’s conflict, it sets readers up for one of the many conflicts present throughout the book: who can Tracker trust, and who can he not? This non-linear set up pulls readers directly into the conflict and pits them against Tracker and the many natural and super-natural forces Marlon weaves throughout the narrative to oppose Tracker’s mission.

BLRW also capitalizes on the mythos of the world Marlon has so carefully constructed. The mingi, the Ogo, even the Leopard’s and Tracker’s own magical capabilities are used to their fullest potential. When the Leopard first changes, readers and Tracker are also struck by the awe of this transformation from beast to man, as noted when Tracker states that “Kava looked at him as if in the world one always sees these things” (39). BLRW doesn’t allow Tracker to simply know about all the different magical things in the world, which prevents him from falling into typical fantasy “chosen one” tropes but allows him and readers to learn about the magical together, making the act of reading BLRW even more of an act of discovery.

Everything about BLRW is carefully crafted so readers and Tracker grow together and experience the breadth of a world that is just outside the real world. But Marlon’s descriptions are what really brings the world of BLRW to life. There are no punches pulled when characters die or terrible things happen—Marlon brings them all to life in gory detail. “The dead men’s mouths tearing open…Even in the dark the ripples rose from their thighs, to belly, to chest and then flew out of the mouth in a cloud inky as night” (337). Each character death, from the Sangoma being pinned to the ceiling with a spear to the Leopard’s death, comes with brutal detail, giving the nature of Tracker’s missions—to track down not only the boy but several other men—throughout the book a sense of true consequence and danger as he embarks to find the Queen’s missing son with the rest of his adventuring crew.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf is an excellent example of non-linear storytelling at its finest. While things like the fight scenes at times get repetitive due to the short, tight prose, the rest of the book makes up for that by instilling not only a sense of discovery in readers, but also one of danger and something magical that lurks just out of reach.