Burning Daylight by Emily McIntire
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
because if you’re going to retell Romeo and Juliet, you might as well make it gritty, plot-twisty, corruption-soaked, and emotionally devastating
I love a retelling, but I love a GOOD retelling even more.
you know, the kind that feels recognizable, not recycled. That makes you go:
“Oh? Oh SHE did something new with it??”
Burning Daylight is exactly that.
It nods at Romeo and Juliet…
but it’s not a copy, not a repaint, not a predictable reenactment.
It’s fresh.
It’s clever.
It’s layered.
It has TEETH.
Roman?
Broody and scarred with a trouble aura so thick you could bottle it.
He LOOKS like he’s one wrong breath from causing chaos but behind that grim exterior?
Fiercely territorial cinnamon roll.
A rags-to-riches dreamboat with a heart he pretends is stone but actually melts the second Juliet blinks in his direction.
He is delicious.
That is the official scientific review.
Juliet starts out as the naive, sheltered rich girl archetype I normally cannot stand but somehow?
I adored her.
Her optimism, her trust, her empathy. They don’t make her weak, they make her magnetic.
You want her to wise up and rise to the moment.
You want her to get the guy and the truth and her whole damn life back.
And the PLOT TWISTS?
Emily McIntire really said:
“How about we peel this town like an onion until every layer is rotting?”
The corruption runs SO deep, so believable, so wild that I was reading like a detective with a caffeine problem. The town is so corrupt that it feels like a character in itself.
The cast of side characters??
NOT A SINGLE WEAK LINK.
Any one of them could headline their own book and I’d show up with a coffee and emotional support snacks.
(Felicity supremacy forever. We all deserve a best friend like her: unhinged, loyal, and emotionally feral for your well-being.)
And the SPICE?
Emily always delivers the exact ratio of intense, needy, desperate, and plot-relevant.
Every scene is so emotionally loaded that I did not even have the capacity to blush.
I was invested.
Obsessed.
Unwell.
By the time I reached the end, I was refreshing Emily McIntire’s socials like a raccoon waiting for someone to drop a sequel breadcrumb.
This book is everything a retelling should be:
recognizable but reinvented, emotional but sharp, romantic but dangerous.
I will be feral until we get more.
xoxo
