I received To Burn In Rapture as an eARC and was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked R.A. Raine’s writing style. This was my first dip into her work, and it didn’t leave me feeling like I wasted my time the way a lot of other novellas do.
However, I would have liked to see more world building and character turmoil. A lack of growth is fine for a novella, but I didn’t really get the sense that Sabine struggled in any real way. She was very numb and lacked any real range of emotion.
Janus was hard to root for. He’s just kind of a dick but I’ll give him a pass because he’s a god. He doesn’t really understand human emotion and certainly doesn’t understand when he feels anything even remotely akin to emotion.
I think overall, it was fine for a novella, but it most definitely could have been made into a full length novel if it had been given more world building, more character depth, and a character arc for Sabine and Janus as well as more detail for their relationship arc. I enjoyed the story itself enough to wish there was more of it and would have loved to see the characters fleshed out more.
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