Siavahda's Reviews > Beneath the Burning Wave

This is incredibly poorly written, with simplistic language, shallow characters, and a complete failure of worldbuilding. Burning Wave is supposed to feature a nonbinary society, but despite everyone using neopronouns, people are still divided by biological sex, with forced roles for those who can become pregnant, aka ‘carriers’.

{A seventeen orbit carrier without a maymu is a freak.}

(Seventeen orbit = seventeen years old, maymu = baby.)

When talking about sexual attraction, one character puts it thus

{I think I prefer my opposite rather than my same.}

Hi – you have completely failed to create a nonbinary, or genderfluid, society. It’s actually kind of embarassing. When you discard the male/female binary, there is no longer any concept of ‘opposites’. So it makes absolutely no sense for your characters to think about it this way.

I was also pretty unhappy that the characters are clearly coded traditionally masculine and feminine, and that it’s the XY characters who have ‘male’ traits and the XX ones who are feminine. Seriously? Not only does your allegedly genderfluid society divide people by sex, you couldn’t be bothered to explore or experiment outside traditional gender roles? Why use neogenders and nonbinary pronouns if you’re just going to replicate the Western cisheteronormative system???

Other reviewers have mentioned that the writing is incredibly confusing. This is very much the case. I was rarely able to understand the reasoning or motivations behind anyone’s actions, and at times the writing just dissolved into the nonsensical.

{I don’t want to live anymore anyway. I am already dead. You all buried me. I am free. I am your fear. I am the air. The sky. The dying. The dead. You are all living in my tomb. I am outside breathing while you suffocate in my stench. Look at you. Your sanctimony. You feast on willing, weak minds to elevate your own sick soul. I am you. You are me. I am half of nothing. You are nothing. Truth is not in this chamber. No one in this chamber seeks truth. You are not judging me. You are judging yourself. You would do what I do if you had the guts. Instead, you are submerged in stagnant red pools. You pretend to be horrified but I see your pleasure. It drips down your legs. Lick it up. It is as close to escape as you will get. I am the horizon. The point of no return. You can finish me but I will begin again.}

This isn’t the speech of a god, or someone communing with some kind of spirit, or even someone intoxicated: this is the inner monologue of one of the main characters when they are brought before the ‘court’ on charges.

Um???

On top of that, the author has filled the book with invented words, without ever explaining what those words mean. Is this noun an animal, vegetable, or mineral? I have no idea. Because characters were described as ‘curling up like a coco’ multiple times, I was picturing some kind of small animal, but eventually I worked out that it’s actually some kind of fruit or nut. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense either – who curls up like a nut? And there are dozens of other terms where it was never clear if the characters were referring to an insect or rodent or maybe a big cat???

This next part isn’t down to bad writing, exactly, just extremely unpleasant: one of the two main characters is a sadist who really, really despises ‘carriers’, and wow it was not fun being in their head.

{I don’t like carriers. I think they are pathetic for letting a maymu take their purpose…They don’t seem to live as long as Maymuans and even if they did they are never allowed to become Experienced.}

Experienced = elders, the governing body of this society. So this genderfluid culture still manages to be sexist towards anyone without a penis. Why???

There are also a lot of scenes involving violence towards animals. I appreciated the author including a content warning for this; however, it seemed hugely gratuitous: at one point a character is walking in the woods and without looking, randomly punches an owl off its branch.

…Why? We already know this character is a villain. You really don’t need to have them punching owls to underline it for us. It’s so stupid it almost becomes funny. Why would anyone punch a random owl? It makes no sense, especially in a culture where you can face the death penalty for killing an animal. But the characters don’t even comment on it, never mind explain it.

To go back to bad writing: it is a bad idea to give your main characters almost identical names. Other reviewers have talked about not being able to hear the difference on the audiobook, and I can tell you that even reading the names on a page, they’re easy to mix up. Writers, please don’t do this.

Finally, I learned that the sadist character is going to set up their own society and it will be misogyny central. I was going to DNF this book already, but when I heard that…I just cannot even.

I read 32%, and it was 32% too much.