Playing with Wildfire
Playing with Wildfire
Playing with Wildfire
Ratings1
Average rating4.5
Playing with Wildfire
Wowwwww. Painful and powerful. Furious and tender and oh so familiar to anyone living in the Western US. This is a novel only in the loosest sense—objectively speaking it’s a collection of vignettes, written in different voices, centering around one massive wildfire and its effects on a small Colorado town—but it’s damned cohesive, and effective, and beautiful.
Pritchett is an impressive writer, evoking a roller coaster of emotions in each short chapter. She starts off strong, with that horrific anxious tension of an approaching fire, and she gets it right: I really felt it from the first two pages. In subsequent chapters she gets the helpless rage, the numbness, humor, bitterness, loss, desire for connection, and even, in a couple of chapters written first-person from the perspective of loser piece-of-shits, lets us see and almost empathize with said losers. She has tremendous heart and compassion, much more than I do. (I will never forgive anyone who lights a campfire in dry conditions).
This is a smart book. Scientifically literate. Respectful of Indigenous perspectives. Well informed on fire behavior, ecology, suppression. Intelligent, well-read characters. But above all it’s a deeply human book. It’s also one I’m glad to have read in February: it would be much too stressful in May.
Wowwwww. Painful and powerful. Furious and tender and oh so familiar to anyone living in the Western US. This is a novel only in the loosest sense—objectively speaking it’s a collection of vignettes, written in different voices, centering around one massive wildfire and its effects on a small Colorado town—but it’s damned cohesive, and effective, and beautiful.
Pritchett is an impressive writer, evoking a roller coaster of emotions in each short chapter. She starts off strong, with that horrific anxious tension of an approaching fire, and she gets it right: I really felt it from the first two pages. In subsequent chapters she gets the helpless rage, the numbness, humor, bitterness, loss, desire for connection, and even, in a couple of chapters written first-person from the perspective of loser piece-of-shits, lets us see and almost empathize with said losers. She has tremendous heart and compassion, much more than I do. (I will never forgive anyone who lights a campfire in dry conditions).
This is a smart book. Scientifically literate. Respectful of Indigenous perspectives. Well informed on fire behavior, ecology, suppression. Intelligent, well-read characters. But above all it’s a deeply human book. It’s also one I’m glad to have read in February: it would be much too stressful in May.