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How To Set A Fire And Why

How To Set A Fire And Why 2

by Jesse Ball
Paperback
Publication Date: 24/02/2016
3/5 Rating 2 Reviews

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A startling, subversive novel about a teenage girl who has lost everything and will burn anything.

Fourteen-year-old Lucia is a young narrator whose voice will long ring in your ears. She is angry with almost everyone, especially people who tell her what to do. She follows the one rule that makes any sense to her:

Don't Do Things You Aren't Proud Of.

Orphaned and living with her elderly aunt in poverty in the converted garage of a large mansion, Lucia makes her way through the world with only a book, a Zippo lighter, and a pocket full of stolen licorice. Expelled from school, again, Lucia spends her days riding the bus to visit her mother in The Home. When Lucia discovers a secret Arson Club, she will do anything to be a part of it. Her own arson manifesto is a marvellous anarchist pamphlet, written with biting wit and striking intelligence.

The voice of teenaged Lucia is a tour de force: a brilliant, wrenching cry from the heart and mind of a super-smart, funny girl who can't help telling us the truth, a riveting chronicle of family, misguided friendship, and loss. How to Set a Fire and Why is Jesse Ball's most accessible novel yet; after Silence Once Begun and A Cure for Suicide, the pyrotechnics on display here will dazzle.

ISBN:
9781925355475
9781925355475
Category:
Contemporary fiction
Format:
Paperback
Publication Date:
24-02-2016
Publisher:
Text Publishing
Country of origin:
Australia
Pages:
294
Dimensions (mm):
234x154x23mm
Weight:
0.39kg
Jesse Ball

Jesse Ball's many works of absurdity and radicalism have been published in more than a dozen languages. He was selected as one of Granta magazine's Best of Young American Novelists in 2017. His novel Census won the Gordon Burn Prize in 2018. He lives in Chicago.

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2 Reviews

I love Lucia, Jesse Ball's lighter-loving angsty teenage narrator. This book is her world as she'd draw it up it in an exercise book for herself. This is what makes this novel so structurally original, but also a little taxing - as if she's plastering us with her every thought in hope of bumping up her word count (you can knock this book over in a couple of hours.)

The way you'll find conversation and thoughts broken down on the page makes everything in this novel feel tangible and superbly plausible. Read it for yourself and you'll be in love with Lucia too.

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“I … though about the fire. I know it was just an abandoned building but I felt like something had happened, a real thing for once. My aunt’s stroke had felt pretty real too. I guess real things happen all at once, and then you go back to the false parade of garbage that characterizes modern life”

How To Set a Fire And Why is the sixth novel by American author, Jesse Ball. Lucia Stanton lives in virtual poverty with her elderly Aunt Margaret in a garage at the back of a messy garden. She has been thrown out of her last school for anti-social behaviour and now attends Whistler High School. When her aunt gives her a notebook with a black felted cover, she decides to use in to write down her predictions: The Book Of How Things Will Go.

It is apparent from her narrative that Lucia is intelligent: a lot smarter than some of her teachers. But Lucia has a subversive streak, and her aunt supports her individuality. Along with predictions, Lucia relates the events of her life in an almost stream-of-consciousness style. And, after some interaction with would-be fire-setters at her new school, she also records in her notebook, her own pamphlet: HOW TO SET A FIRE AND WHY.

Lucia’s behaviour may be related to the reason that her mother is essentially catatonic in a care facility, that her father is dead (his Zippo lighter is her only remaining piece of him), and that her aunt is now her guardian. But whatever those events may be, they are never revealed to the reader. Lucia is bright and audacious, but for older readers, may be a little difficult to relate to, and some readers may have difficulty with the lack of quotation marks for speech. Kelly Blair has designed a brilliantly clever cover to showcase this highly original novel.

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