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.

Review: "When the World Didn't End" by Guinevere Turner

When the World Didn't End by Guinevere Turner
Published May 2023 via Crown
★★★★

There have been points in my life when keeping a record of what was happening to me felt like the only power I had, writes Turner in the author's note (loc. 95*). Raised in the Lyman Family, her childhood was in some ways idyllic: living with a pack of other children as playmates, making games out of chores, hours outside on the Farm. Singing and fishing and learning to play the banjo.

But also: no medical care. Doomsday prophecies. Almost no contact with "the World". Young girls chosen by adult men as "brides". Everyday life—the big things and the small—dictated by the whims of a few elite at the top. And then Turner's mother left the Lyman Family (not to be confused with the Family International), and Turner was thrust out into the World with her.

When the World Didn't End takes Turner up through her late teenage years, at which point she'd barely started to process her experience in the Lyman Family "commune"—barely started to process the knowledge that it hadn't been all idyll. Cults are so often something to escape, but for Turner, her upbringing represented a safer place than the World she found herself part of after leaving the Family. Turner holds close to the story as she lived it, choosing to bring in very little of her adult understanding, but I can only imagine that it took further years and years of processing to understand and frame her experience. It's a gripping story, and a sad one (what kind of person tells a child who basically deifies them that they no longer love that child?).

I quoted the author's note above, but it's interesting to note that although keeping a record was a source of power for Turner, those records and diaries were never private, nor expected to be. I'm speculating here, but I wonder whether there's any connection between that experience and her later work as an actress and screenwriter—a sense that any word or facial expression or movement would on some level be judged as a performance.

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

*I read an ARC, and quotes may not be final.

Review: "None of This Is Serious" by Catherine Prasifka

None of This Is Serious by Catherine Prasifka
Published April 2022 via Canongate
★★

Sophie is recently graduated, refreshing social media and waiting for something to happen. In love with her fuckboy-to-end-all-fuckboys best friend, she refreshes his social media pages to see who he's shagging and whether she might have a chance. A crack shudders through the sky, and Sophie refreshes social media to see what the self-proclaimed experts are saying about it.

None of This Is Serious is clearly part story, part social commentary, but I'd had well enough of Sophie and her cohort by midway through the book. It's hard to say that this is plot-driven (crack aside, not all that much happens), but at the same time there's not all that much development by way of characters either—they fall in and out of relationships and in and out of bed, but I don't know that I can look at any given character here and say that there's any real growth from beginning to end.

Though this is, as it is meant to be, definitively modern (watch as Sophie refreshes social media yet again), it's heavy on symbolism and light on...most other things. Not my cup of tea—the eagerness I started with turned tepid and then stone-cold as the book went on, and as Sophie refreshed social media. Again.

Review: "Dances" by Nicole Cuffy

 

Dances by Nicole Cuffy
Published May 2023 via One World
★★★★

Cece is a dancer—it's all she's ever wanted to be, and at 22 she's poised to shatter barriers as the first Black principal dancer at NYCB. But even as her professional life is taking off, her personal life is getting murkier, as Cece wrestles with the future of her romantic relationship and where she and her mother and brother fall with each other.

If nothing else this book set in the dance world is full of just that: dance. Details about steps and rehearsals and muscles popping and sore toes. This is not the book for you if you want ballet to be the background while romance or something else is at the forefront; it is the book for you if you want a novel that is about ballet in the sense that it is what the main character lives for, and what she is happiest thinking about and doing. I am, uncoordinated non-dancer that I am, oddly fond of dance books, so this was right up my alley—lots of time in the studio, lots of ironing out kinks, lots of steps and sweat and minute details.

There is nonetheless quite a bit of interpersonal conflict and to-do, but I like the line that Dances is toeing between, well, drama and lack of drama. There are quite a lot of ways in which this could get Dramatic, but I find it more interesting—and Cece more likable, if that matters—that she's pretty calm about things, pretty measured, even when things get difficult or she doesn't like an outcome.

Cuffy more or less opts out of recent real-world conversations about abuse in the dance world (including at NYCB), but there is a consistent through-thread of what it means for Cece to be Black in a field (not just ballet but classical ballet) that has not traditionally been accepting of performers who are not lily-white: not just that she is held to different standards, but that she's constantly held up against a single other successful Black ballerina. For a very long time the vast majority of the fiction, too, about ballet has been about white girls and women, and it's nice to see that changing—even if it might be a while before the real version of NYCB catches up.

Not everything is tied up with a bow here. I'd have liked more resolution with Cece's family, and I'm very curious about Irine's company...enough so that I'm wondering whether there might eventually be a related book focusing on her, but maybe that's just me daydreaming about more dance books?

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

Review: "Sky Above Kharkiv" by Serhiy Zhadan

Sky Above Kharkiv by Serhiy Zhadan
Translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler
English translation published May 2023 via Yale University Press
★★★★

Ukrainian flags flutter above the city. Tomorrow, we'll wake up one day closer to our victory.

These are two of the enduring refrains of Zhadan's war diary. Written in the first four months of war, Sky Above Kharkiv offers up a glimpse into a besieged city. Zhadan is a writer, not a fighter, but he and many of his friends stayed as bombs rained down upon the city because, as he says, we have a lot of work to do (loc. 56*). In the months following the Russian invasion, he took daily to Facebook to provide updates as he roamed the city, collecting and delivering supplies and checking in on troops and civilians alike.

Don't forget one thing, my friends. History isn't just being rewritten right now. It's being written in Ukrainian. (March 8, 1:48 p.m.)

This is, again, a war diary: The individual posts were written for publication on Facebook, but not intended for broader distribution. Read with that in mind—many characters show up once and not again, and there is no easy ending, and in fact there is no ending at all. But Zhadan writes with a poet's sensibility (and enduring sky-and-wheat patriotism) even in short posts. The war drones on, but Ukraine continues on as David against Goliath.

To put it simply, I feel fortunate to live in this city. The residents of Kharkiv have shown so much courage, so much strength, and so much humanity over the past few days. I've never seen anything like it anywhere. Everything will be all right, everything will be Ukraine. Ukrainian flags flutter above the city. (March 16, 2:24 p.m.)

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

*I read an ARC, so quotes may not be final.

Review: "Paper Planes" by Jennie Wood

Paper Planes by Jennie Wood
Published May 2023 via Maverick
★★★★

It's summer, but Leighton isn't at tennis camp as planned: instead, she and Dylan are at a summer program in the woods—for therapy, for punishment. They were friends, before, or more than friends, or maybe not friends anymore, and then there was the Incident, and now they're here. Here, and communicating mostly via paper planes.

This graphic novel grew on me—the art doesn't entirely fit my personal tastes (miles beyond anything I could draw, mind! But I'm still a bit confused about why Dylan appears to have a receding hairline), but it's well executed, and there are interesting relationship dynamics that develop throughout the book. I love that we see variety of sexuality and gender, and that it's almost never treated as a big deal. A few things are unclear to me, like Leighton's parents' treatment of Dylan (in some ways they're very accepting, but in other ways they're eager to reject Dylan), Leighton's sister's story, etc. What sold me, though, is the end—which I won't spoil, but suffice it to say that I'm always happiest when things are still a little messy at the end, and characters don't all end up with exactly what they want. The paper planes floating throughout the book are also a very nice theme...whether the intended recipient reads the notes they contain or not.

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

Review: "Body Grammar" by Jules Ohman

Body Grammar by Jules Ohman
Published 2022 via Vintage
★★★★

Jules has the genes to be a model, or so the scouts tell her. She's more comfortable behind the camera—until an accident turns things upside-down and she needs a change, and now.

Body Grammar makes for a blunt and raw look at modelling. It's not all bad—Jules makes friends, has some success, learns something about setting limits. But there's not a lot of glamour, either: she's tired and overworked, she has limited say in what she does, she has to learn about setting those limits, and she's still more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it. But I love that this lives in the gritty spaces rather than the sparkly ones, while managing not to be...what's the fiction equivalent of a misery memoir? It seems like so many books about the life of a model default to either 'fancy dresses! and money! and parties! and i'm popular now!' or 'everyone is abusive and this is terrible', when the reality for the vast, vast majority of models will be somewhere in between. This reminds me somewhat of Meat Market—successful model breaking onto the scene, some good and some bad—and I guess now I'd just like to see some of the stories of the girls who move to New York thinking they'll be the next hot thing and end up scrounging for, I don't know, third-rate ad work, struggling to pay their bills and constantly on the brink of being dropped by their agencies. Still, I'd take piles more books like this over the usual uncomplicated fluff pieces. Messy and satisfying.

Review: "Firebird" by Elizabeth Wein

Firebird by Elizabeth Wein
Published 2018 via Barrington Stoke
★★★

I was born in a nation at war. I grew up in the shadow of war. And, like everyone else my own age, I had been waiting all my life for "the future war". (12)

As Germany closes in on Leningrad, Nastia takes to the skies: out of Leningrad and away from the front lines—for now. A qualified pilot with far more flight hours than many of the men in the sky, it's nonetheless slow going for the government to approve woman pilots taking an active role in the war.

Like White Eagles, Firebird is written for less confident readers—shorter and with simpler language than her more mainstream books, but with the same teenage-ready themes and love of flying. I love that this one highlights Nastia being afraid; she's as solid a pilot as she can be, but that doesn't make her invincible, and even as she finds ways to power through, she finds her early experiences with war understandably terrifying.

I said this with White Eagles too, but this is one that really, really makes me hope that Wein will eventually write something longer about the female pilots of the USSR. I've read a (very) little about them, and the differences between their experience and the UK experience (for example) are fascinating. Women flying in combat; a city under siege; even the fact that the USSR supported Germany up until shortly before Germany invaded them. (Nastia's story is not really one of Leningrad, but there's a story in there too—we get a bit of it from the letters she receives, but...oof. I've been reading a bit about the siege since finishing this book, and it's just staggering.)

The ambiguous ending is great, but I'd have loved a longer book with more space to explore the chief's story, or Blondie's, et cetera. I do think Firebird is doing exactly what it set out to do, but I suppose I'm back to eagerly awaiting Wein's next full-length book.

Review: "Small Things Like These" by Claire Keegan

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Published November 2021
★★★

It's the mid-80s, and in parts of the world the economy is booming, but you wouldn't know it to look at parts of small-town Ireland. Bill Furlong is fortunate—his position as a coal merchant makes his finances more stable than many, and he does his best to pass on that good fortune in the form of solid education for his daughters, lenient payment policies, and gifts of wood for those who need it. And he's more fortunate still: his mother was unmarried, and were it not for the grace of her employer at the time, Furlong would likely have been born in a Catholic home for unmarried mothers and raised with the understanding that he was naught but a bastard.

Keegan writes a tightly crafted novella. There's a lot at play here: Furlong's past, who his father is or might be, his family now, the economy, his limited but growing understanding of what it means for a woman to end up in a "Magdalene Laundry." Because his mother was spared the laundries, Furlong has never had much reason to spare them a thought, but the opinion in town is clear: We don't think about those things. Those girls brought it upon themselves.

I haven't read much about the Magdalene Laundries—enough to know that the abuse Keegan describes here is true—but this makes me want to read more. I haven't quite gotten on the Keegan train, though: as much as I can appreciate the tight plot and the understated nature of the characters, I've found both this and Foster to edge toward something a bit saccharine. Small Things Like These, in particular, reminds me a little bit of The Story of Holly and Ivy, which I adored as a child but don't necessarily want a grown-up version of.

Still...I can see the appeal, and I look forward to Keegan eventually coming out with a full-length novel.

Review: "Nigeria Jones" by Ibi Zoboi

Nigeria Jones by Ibi Zoboi
Published May 2023 via Balzer + Bray
★★★★

Nigeria Jones has been raised to be a warrior, a revolutionary, a queen. Her father has dedicated his life to the Movement, and he wants Nigeria by his side as he dismantles white supremacy and forms a new, Black nation. This is the only world Nigeria knows, and until recently it's been the only world she wanted to know. But being in the fight day in and day out is exhausting, and the rest of the city, the state, the country—even with its racism and its injustices, even with white-majority spaces and white privilege—is calling.

Nigeria's story is complicated by the fact that her mother is no longer here, no longer in the Movement. She'd been all in for most of Nigeria's life, but her version of freedom was different than that of her husband, with different dreams: Nigeria in top institutions, with the option to break barriers from within as well as without. (Choices. A lot of the book comes down to choices.) And Nigeria is waiting desperately for her mother to return, but in the meantime she's adrift, with more responsibilities and questions than ever.

Zoboi paints such a nuanced picture here. There's so much that Nigeria wants to be and do—but she's not sure how much of it is available to her, both because the country's institutions were built for white people and because her father is so adamant that she have nothing to do with those institutions. But her father is not the villain, and nor should he be: he is a radical, outspoken in ways that make people uncomfortable, and he is truly doing what he believes is best for his people generally and Nigeria specifically. I love that there are so few character-villains here—there are characters who do not stand up when they should, and there are characters who stand up too loudly, and there are characters who make choices or comments rooted in ignorance. There isn't any one person to vanquish over the course of the book, though, and the book is far richer for it—it's not like systemic racism and oppression can be overcome by taking down one character, after all. To that end, I also love how conflicted Nigeria is: she wants some of the things her father has railed against, like education in an excellent but primarily white school, but she is also too much her father's daughter to accept such an environment easily, or to discard the truths that she know. Hers is not a story of discarding one belief system for another but of starting the process of interrogating her beliefs and truths and figuring out for herself what holds up.

There's a reveal near the end (keeping it vague to avoid spoilers!) that I'm not particularly keen on—I could see it coming from some distance away, but as a matter of personal preference I tend to prefer that sort of material to be worked in (and worked through) over the course of a book rather than held back from the reader. No matter how well it is done, I always read it as a bit gimmicky. That said—it is very well done here, and heart-wrenching to boot.

Here's hoping that this book makes it into many, many libraries and teenagers' bookshelves.

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