Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Length: 240 pages
Audiobook Length: 5 hours and 12 minutes
First Published: 2018
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Rachael’s Review
Blaming herself for her mother’s death, Phoebe Lin enters the elite Edwards University and meets Will Kendall, who quickly falls in love with her. Phoebe’s guilt and grief lead her into a secretive extremist cult with ties to domestic terrorism. Can Will stop her from going too far? I could not get into Kwon’s novel; the storytelling was so dry and emotionless and the timeline was all over the place that I quickly decided it wasn’t worth my time.
Publisher’s Description
A powerful, darkly glittering novel of violence, love, faith, and loss, as a young woman at an elite American university is drawn into a cult’s acts of terrorism.
Phoebe Lin and Will Kendall meet in their first month at prestigious Edwards University. Phoebe is a glamorous girl who doesn’t tell anyone she blames herself for her mother’s recent death. Will is a misfit scholarship boy who transfers to Edwards from Bible college, waiting tables to get by. What he knows for sure is that he loves Phoebe.
Grieving and guilt-ridden, Phoebe is drawn into a secretive cult founded by a charismatic former student with an enigmatic past. When the group commits a violent act in the name of faith, Will finds himself struggling to confront a new version of the fanaticism he’s worked so hard to escape. Haunting and intense, The Incendiaries is a fractured love story that explores what can befall those who lose what they love most.
Quotes from The Incendiaries
People with no experience of God tend to think that leaving the faith would be a liberation, a flight from guilt, rules, but what I couldn’t forget was the joy I’d known, loving Him.
By the time I quit, I realized I’d rather have no talent than just enough to know how much I lacked.
I’m afraid being alone isn’t a skill. It’s a disposition.
About R. O. Kwon
R. O. Kwon is the author of The Incendiaries. Born in South Korea, she has lived most of her life in the United States. Visit the author’s website →
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