Book Review - The Last Thing to Burn by Will Dean

Title: The Last Thing to Burn
Series: -
Author: Will Dean
 
Description: On an isolated farm in the United Kingdom, a woman is trapped by the monster who kidnapped her seven years ago. When she discovers she is pregnant, she resolves to protect her child no matter the cost, and starts to meticulously plan her escape. But when another woman is brought into the fold on the farm, her plans go awry. Can she save herself, her child, and this innocent woman at the same time? Or is she doomed to spend the remainder of her life captive on his farm?
 
Review: There should be trigger-warnings for “The Last Thing to Burn”. The book shows several ways of physical, sexual and emotional violence and abuse. That said, this is a creepy story about human trafficking and sexual slavery.
 
We start the book with Jane (her real name is Thanh Dao) who is running. She can’t get far because of her hurting ankle and is soon found by Len. He has been keeping her captive for the past years, on his remote farm. Thanh Dao and her sister have been brought to England illegally, as refugees from Vietnam. Smuggled by human traffickers and sold as sex slaves.
 
Len is a repulsive, despicable man, who gets worse and worse, especially because he breaks Thanh Dao’s self-worth. The title of the book refers to the punishment to burn her personal belongings one by one, so she will behave. We see everything from Thanh Dao’s perspective and some decisions Len makes seem a but strange. Especially the motive in the second half of the book, where not an illegal refugee but a local is being held. Overall, it is not very credible that this man is even on one side of a human smuggling and slavery operation.
 
When I started this book, I was intrigued and sucked in. It felt like a book I was going to love. But that changed drastically. At one point in the book, it feels like you’re reading the same thing over and over again. It becomes repetitive and I lost interest. Len obviously has some sort of English accent or dialect, which I found very strange to read. He left out certain words, or something like that. I found it unpleasant to read. It read like a Vietnamese refugee spoke better and more fluent English then the actual Englishman. It really bothered me.
 
With that, the book was predictable. I was expecting some twist or a great finale, but nothing like that happened. The story was mostly about Thanh Dao’s survival and how she survived all this time by hanging on to her memories. Which is a beautiful thing, of course, but it never grabbed me. I felt like the author, Will Dean, was building up to something, but we never got there. “The Last Thing to Burn” dragged and felt so long for a pretty short book.
 
This story had such potential, but didn’t use it to the fullest. I feel bad to rate it this low, since it has a very high average rating on GoodReads. I just didn’t enjoy this book.
 
Rating: 2/ 5