A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

The fire had miles of uninhabited acres to play with, where it could leap across bare spots and jump feet first into the fuel. It didn't need roads. It could make its own highway.

A disaster novel with a large cast in a smallish space over a very short span of time - 3:15 to 4:55 - as a brush fire engulfs a Los Angeles neighborhood on a weekday, when most of the adults are away.

Flash Fire functions as a mini-epic - Arthur Hailey in 169 pages. Most of the characters are children or teenagers plus a firefighter in his early 20s who used to live in the area, plus brief appearances by their parents, miscellaneous fire victims and firefighters, a disgruntled gate guard, and a family of tourists turned opportunistic looters.

The tight time-frame emphasizes how terrifyingly fast a fire spreads, and sections showing its progress make it feel like a character in its own right. So does the neighborhood: Pinch Canyon, a small and wealthy area in a firetrap canyon with houses clinging precariously to the sides. The main focus is on three houses that share a driveway and the people in them.

The Press House contains a teenage brother and sister plus seven rescue kittens. Danna, the younger sister, longs for excitement and makes fire contingency plans to rescue the kittens and a neighbor's two horses. This isn't random, as fires are currently engulfing other parts of LA.

Hall, the older brother, secretly wants to work with children with disabilities; this is a secret because his wealthy entertainment industry parents want their kids to be financially successful. Hall is one of exactly two people in the neighborhood who actually cares about Geoffrey, the adopted child next door.

Geoffrey lives in the Aszling House. He's a Romanian orphan with an attachment disorder whom his asshole parents adopted, regretted adopting when he wasn't sufficiently rewarding, and has dumped on poorly-paid babysitters ever since. He rarely speaks. The other current inhabitants of the house are Chiffon (not her real name), the teenage nanny who couldn't care less about Geoffrey, and Elony, the cleaner, a 17-year-old refugee who escaped horrors and is desperately trying to learn to speak and read English with no help or resources whatsoever.

The Severyn House contains Beau, a practically perfect teenage boy; Elisabeth, his eight-year-old sister who can't do anything right as far as her parents are concerned; and a box of ashes on the mantelpiece. The ashes are all that's left of their much-older half-brother Michael, who was disowned by their father for being gay and died of AIDS. They never met him, but their father ended up with his ashes, which he put in the living room and then never discussed. Beau has gotten a little obsessed with Michael, the brother he never knew. Would his father abandon him too if he stepped out of line? Does anyone but Beau care about Michael now?

This juicy cast of characters gets run through the wringer when the fire leaps to the canyon. Relationships are forged and broken, people rise to the occasion or very much don't, and not all of them survive. The looters are weird caricatures but the main cast is sharply sketched and believable. Hall loves Geoffrey when no one else does, but he barely registers that Elony exists; Beau cares about Elisabeth when no one else does, but he expresses it by trying to fix her so their parents will like it more, so she perceives him as yet another person constantly trying to mold her into someone she's not. I particularly liked Elony, who's coming from an entirely different world than the rest of them and is no stranger to death, danger, and having her life turned upside down in an instant.

While the kids are generally sympathetic, the view of the adults is bleak. Two out of three of the sets of parents are privileged, blinkered, and uncaring; one of them gets shaken out of their narcissistic pattern but there's no telling how long that will last. The one set of loving parents is so engrossed in work that they rather hilariously don't even realize their kids are in danger until it's all over.

( Read more... )

Cooney's brief was probably to be educational about wildfires, how they're fought, and how to survive them, which she absolutely is, and to tell an exciting story, which she absolutely does. I could not put this book down. It's not as good as Flight #116 is Down! but it's much better than Emergency Room. Once again: much better than it needed to be.

Content notes: Outdated information on autism/attachment disorders. Depictions of ableism and racism. Death by fire. Animals and children in danger. (The kittens survive and the horses are implied to survive.)

Only $1.99 on Kindle, and well worth it.

The book takes place over three hours in an ER in the ominously named The City, with chapters broken up among many points of view and labeled with their exact time. It's going for an Arthur Hailey/James Michener-esque epic in a very short space, and it does succeed in capturing that type of feel.

The characters we follow include a college student who's hit by a stray bullet in a gang shootout, a gangster who shows up at the ER to finish off the guy he shot on purpose, and a high school student who crashes a motorcycle. The characters I cared the most about are interestingly both there not for medical reasons but to escape their homes: a teenage mother of twins at the end of her rope, and an eight-year-old neglected child there who brought her younger siblings with her because there's air conditioning and crayons.

The main characters are a pair of aspiring medical students volunteering at the ER, Seth and Diana. Seth is humorless and arrogant. Diana is insecure and sharp-tongued. The book had other problems but they were one of the biggest. I neither liked nor cared about either of them.

The book was written in 1997 and you can tell, in good, bad, and historically interesting ways. An HIV positive baby is going to die, period. The City is a complete urban hellscape where it's dangerous to go outside because you WILL get shot... which is actually true of America to some degree, but it's described in a very 1997 way.

Cooney goes well out of her way to not be racist about what is essentially a racist trope, and succeeds to some extent (she has a multiracial cast of all sorts of people) but accidentally shines light on exactly how racist that trope is. I kept being brought up short by her gangsters being white (or at least some of them are, I forget), because they're described in a way that is pretty much always reserved for teenage Black gangsters. Calling it the City was a mistake, IMO; just inventing a city with a name would have worked better. The allegorical name clashes with the realistic details and also adds to the sense of "cities are terrifying hellscapes filled with scary people of color" except Cooney clearly doesn't agree with that part so she kept everything but that, highlighting how completely nonsensical the trope is - it has literally no basis beyond racism.

I was hoping this would be along the lines of Flight #116 is Down! and it kind of is, but it's nowhere near as good. It's not a failure by any means - it wants to tell an exciting and informative story about what a big-city ER is like - but that's all it is. It's a perfectly fine example of what it is, but Flight #116 is Down! is above and beyond what it is.

Driver’s Ed: The only life and death course in school.

With that tagline, I was expecting the kids to crash and accidentally kill someone. Had I looked at the cover, I would have realized how they actually actually kill someone, which is by stealing street signs as a lark… including a stop sign on a dark road. Oops.

Like Flight 116 is Down! this book leans into its premise and is better than it needed to be. Much of it reads like a high school-set noir, in which a careless action causes horrifically spiraling consequences, while the guilty party writhes and sweats inwardly as the investigation heats up around them.

It’s also more emotionally affecting than I expected, with vivid supporting characters who all have their own motivations and agendas--the bored driver's ed teacher who doesn't bother to learn his students' names, the politician father, the anguished husband of the woman who was killed, the student who is terrified of driving and so misses out on the whole thing. In particular, the heroine’s relationship with her younger brother is unusual and rewarding.

Driver's Ed