Ember Burning by Jennifer Alsever

🌟 out of 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Synopsis:
Senior year was supposed to be great--that's what Ember's friend Maddie promised at the beginning of the year. Instead, Ember TrouvE spends the year drifting in and out of life like a ghost, haunted by her parents' recent, tragic death.

At home, she pores over her secret obsession: pictures of missing kids-- from newspaper articles, from grocery store flyers-- that she's glued inside a spiral notebook. Like her, the people are lost. Like her, she discovers, they had been looking for a way to numb their pain when they disappeared.

When Ember finds herself in Trinity Forest one day, a place locals stay away from at all costs, she befriends a group of teenagers who are out camping. Hanging out with them in the forest tainted with urban legends of witchcraft and strange disappearances, she has more fun than she can remember having. But something isn't right.

The candy-covered wickedness she finds in Trinity proves to be a great escape, until she discovers she can never go home. Will Ember confront the truth behind her parents' death, or stay blissfully numb and lose herself to the forest forever?

***ARC provided by publishers via Netgalley in exchange of honest review***

This book was certainly creative and reminded me of The Raven Boys a bit. It has the same magical/mystic feel to it although Ember Burning does not have a group of friends that are working towards the same end goal and/or solving a mystery.
I wasn't sure what to make of Ember. She seemed like one big contradiction because she would feel one thing but do something completely different. She didn't seem affected by certain things that happened in the book and this bothered me a lot. I don't feel like an issue should be added to a book if the author is not planning to take the time to delve into the consequences of that event on the character both emotionally and physically. I didn't find Ember to be a likeable character. She was extremely selfish and self destructive. I didn't want her to be successful in any of her endeavors because I didn't feel that she had any redeeming qualities.
Ember Burning was too trippy for me. I can understand what the author was trying to do but it just wasn't for me. It didn't seem like there was any triumph or joy in the story. I know that there is a sequel but there a lot of issues that are brought up within the book without any of them being resolved at all. It didn't seem like any of the characters grew throughout the book. I needed something to change or happen and it did not.