Review: "Burnt" by Clare Frank

 

Burnt by Clare Frank
Published May 2023 via Abrams
★★★★

In another life, I want to be a wildland firefighter. That ship has sailed as far as this life goes, but "fire memoir" is one of my pet subgenres, and Frank has seen a little bit of everything—from seasonal firefighting to permanent positions to working her way up the ranks. For all the fire memoirs I've read, precious few have been written by women (though Caroline Paul's Fighting Fire is an enduring favorite), and fewer (read: none) have covered life as part of the brass. Burnt changes that.

Burnt starts relatively slowly (and it is taking everything in me not to make a pun here), with Frank in the thick of it but not on the ground, but if you're looking for the more classic firefighting story, that's here in spades too, from early days of training to hours and days spent battling wildfires to responding to accident scenes. Despite (well-intentioned) parents who understood girls' options to boil down to "mother" or "nun," Frank was hell-bent on carving her own path...and so what we get here is a singular path forged by fire and determination.

I'm very intrigued by the variation in the stations where she worked—I suppose I'm used to either stories of city firefighters, who battle structural fires and so on, or stories of wildland firefighters, whose entire careers can be shaped by the seasonal rhythms of fire. Frank managed to land somewhere in the middle, between her first love of wildland firefighting and her later work in more built-up areas, each with their own successes and challenges. It's also perhaps worth noting that, although much of the book takes place twenty or more years ago, many of the parts attributable to climate (dry years leading to devastating fires, for example) will resonate today. I can only imagine what someone in Frank's position today might have to write twenty years from now.

Frank is smart about the book's structure, avoiding a linear timeline that would bog down the back end (no shade to the brass and other people working vital desk jobs to get things organized and funded, but for most of us, it's less fun to read about). There is still some inevitable deceleration, but then, with a book built around the stages of a fire...perhaps that's inevitable.

Also, perhaps, inevitable: one of these days I'll have to split my "row like your boat is on fire" Goodreads shelf into "row, row, row your boat" and "burn, baby, burn"...

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a free review copy through NetGalley.