So I received a review copy of this book from the author (it’s currently available for preorder from Clash Books, shipping in May) so I hope this review will help you figure out if you might want to pick this book up.
First up, I’ll say that Clash Books know how to make their books look good. If I had the money to drop on new books, you can guarantee that I’d be getting my fair share of titles from Clash. It’s one of the reasons I’m thrilled to be publishing with them myself.
The next thing I should address is that going into this book I had no idea what it was about and no familiarity of the author or her work. Only the title and cover art promising something youthful and possibly a littke rebellious.
Burn Fortune is the story of a teenage girl in small town Americana. It’s told in a series of vignettes which paint the picture of this girl called June, and her family and friends, girls and boys, and the boyfriend.
This isn’t really a plot driven piece. It’s not about action or a sequence of events going from a to b to c to d. It’s not about building drama or suspense as it’s about those snapshots of everyday life in this quite uncanny American town. Uncanny to me at least because the story takes place in that quaint familiar setting, focused on an American school where the things described there feel like real and tangible parts of June’s everyday life, things which are so familiar to me through tropes which have been explored in countless stories about teenagers and high schools in America, and yet I’m an Australian who has only ever known an Australian education, and this representation of American schools doesn’t quite seem real the way I know school to be, if that makes sense.
What I think is really compelling about this story is its focus. While it shifts from scene to scene with some tangible thread holding it together via character and place, you really get to immerse yourself into this world and get to know these characters as they try to navigate this strange and awkward period in their lives where friction and drama are their whole world. As they come into their own independence there’s a lot of discovery going on.
Brandi Homan really shines a light on this sense of teenage exploration, and the results are at times truly devastating.
And I think that’s where this book leaves you with this one burning question:
How do you process grief and trauma in your life when your whole world is still so small and you really have nothing to compare it to?
I thought of things like Daria and American Pie and the like when I was reading Burn Fortune, but the key difference is that this book doesn’t have that comic relief or the nostalgia. It doesn’t gloss over the hard truths to tell a story of the school years you look back on with fondness. It reminds you that that light hearted and youthful image of your school years were a fiction, a narrative construction that totally missed the experience entirely.
This story captures the raw heart of the high school experience and reminds you that for some folks it can get downright ugly. Make of that what you will.
S.T. CARTLEDGE 