The Burning Season
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
In this riveting coming-of-age survival story in verse perfect for fans of Alan Gratz, a fire lookout-in-training must find her courage when a wildfire breaks out on her watch.
Twelve-year-old Opal has a secret: she’s deathly afraid of fire. Still Opal is preparing to become a fourth-generation lookout on Wolf Mountain, deep in the New Mexico wilderness. She, Mom, and Gran live at ten thousand feet in a single room at the top of a fire tower. They are responsible for spotting any hint of smoke before it becomes an uncontrollable blaze.
Instead of training for the lonely life of a lookout, Opal wishes she could be starting seventh grade in Silver City, attending real classes with kids her own age and even going to afterschool clubs like FFA. But Wolf Mountain has other ideas. When Mom makes the long trek to town for supplies and Gran goes missing, Opal is the only one to spot a tell-tale spiral of smoke moving up the mountainside. She’ll have to be braver than she’s ever been as she heads into the woods, beyond Wolf Ridge’s old blackened burn scar, to face down a fire on her own. But when a fire is what took her father away, and Opal herself knows the sting of smoke and lick of flames, how can she be brave enough when it really counts?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of fire season, Opal Gloria Halloway, newly 12 and raised by her mother and grandmother in a fire tower in New Mexico's Gila Wilderness, begins her training as a fourth-generation female lookout. Via first-person verse that employs language both lyrically evocative ("The sun rests on the mesa/ washing our ridge in pinks and golds") and mundane ("Gran's done so much for me"), Opal shares her pride and eagerness to carry on her family's work while harboring a secret: a harrowing experience with the devastating Black Fire two years earlier has left her pyrophobic. Exposition surrounding the family's background and fire management information initially slows the action, but as Rose (Miraculous) layers ongoing drama, the tension ramps up. In a gripping climax, Opal, alone, hunts for and then fights to contain a blaze indicated by a "finger of white" she spots while searching for her recently disappeared grandmother. An author's note provides a history of fire management—and mismanagement—and details methods of fire control developed centuries ago by Indigenous peoples and those used today. The Halloways are white. Ages 10–up.
