Green Fuse Burning was a hauntingly beautiful metaphor about grief and loss, life and death, and our connection to the natural world. Tiffany Morris’s writing is lyrical and it feels more like poetry than prose. You can tell that each word was chosen carefully, meant to literally paint a picture and conjure emotional reactions in the reader.

This is not your typical kind of novel. It follows the story of Rita, an artist struggling with the death of her estranged father. Rita is grappling with her disconnect to her Mi'kmaq identity - the language and culture, her family history, and all the questions she never asked of her father and now never can. Then her girlfriend, Molly, goes behind her back to get her an artist’s residency and she ends up on the land her father grew up on, in an isolated cabin to paint. And bizarre things start happening. But it never becomes clear to the reader how many of these strange things actually happened, and how much might have simply been in her mind.

There is not a typical story arc in this novella. Each chapter starts with the description of a painting, and then we get the story from the woods behind each painting, knowing that the artist who painted them vanished shortly after their creation. It was an intriguing way to write the story, but also a bit jarring. I felt like I kept getting pulled out of the narrative and then thrown back in.

There is no real “resolution” in this story, at least in terms of what happened in those woods. The conflict in this story (bizarre happenings aside) is much more internal. It’s about Rita’s struggles with being alive, her questions about life and death and what it all means - especially as it relates to her indigenous heritage. I was expecting to see more about her reconnection to her Mi'kmaq roots and identity, though.

This book is definitely more niche and I know some people will absolutely love it. It was just okay for me, though. I loved the writing and the premise of the book. And while the words themselves grabbed me, the story didn’t.

I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley and Stelliform Press and leave this review voluntarily.

TW/CW: parental death, suicidal ideation, animal death/gore, PTSD, depression