How to Set a Fire and Why

Starred review from April 4, 2016
The beautifully blunt narration of a gifted delinquent propels this excellent sixth novel from the author of A Cure for Suicide. Orphaned after the death of her father and her mother’s subsequent institutionalization, young Lucia Stanton finds herself expelled from high school (the specific location of which is never given) for stabbing a star athlete with a pencil. Entrusted to the care of her elderly, sagely aunt, Lucia transfers to Whistler High, where, in the form of a secret arson society, she discovers an outlet for her inner turmoil. Penning her own pamphlet on fire starting (the titular “How To Set a Fire and Why”), Lucia details a philosophy that smartly parallels the novel’s own—namely, that writing literature is, like arson, an act of creation and destruction. The few successful friendships and personal bonds Lucia makes are swiftly undone by a late-act tragedy, but, in the book’s pyromaniacal finale, Lucia finds a thrilling form of freedom. In an age of blandly interchangeable YA narrators, this novel is a song of teenage heartbreak sung with a movingly particular sadness, a mature meditation on how actually saying something, not just speaking, is what most makes a voice human. Agent: Becky Sweren, Kuhn Projects.

May 1, 2016
A troubled adolescent girl dreams of setting fire to the world. It starts with a stabbing and ends with a conflagration, and, in between, the novel never once telegraphs where it's going. Serial surrealist Ball (A Cure for Suicide, 2015, etc.) has been justly accused of a variety of experimental ploys, but you can't deny that when he delivers, it's never quite what you expected. In this stark epistolary novel, the author fully occupies the inner life of a teenage girl, Lucia Stanton, who is writing down her experiences. When we meet her, she's in the principal's office for stabbing a boy who touched her most treasured possession, her dead father's Zippo lighter. "So, I said, many times I said it, don't touch this lighter or I will kill you," she writes. "I think because I am a girl people thought I didn't mean it." Lucia lives with her kindly but destitute aunt in a converted garage with an overgrown garden. She makes predictions--not telling the future, she stresses--and writes them down in The Book of How Things Will Go. She's not as profane as Salinger's Holden Caulfield, but they share a certain aimlessness and cynicism about adults that rings true. Over the course of the novel, Lucia visits her ailing mother, gets high, flunks out of school, and ultimately falls in with some disillusioned young people in an Arson Club that dares her to start a fire. She also pens a brilliant pamphlet of the same title that's nested within the pages of her scribblings. "It takes you some years to become the person who can burn a building, so be it," she writes. "Carry your matches in your pocket, look at the faces of those who surround you in the crowd. Are we not all the same? Do we not all strive to simply have enough?" A brilliant portrayal of a girl who's quite aware of what she's going through.

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Starred review from June 1, 2016
In Ball's latest imaginative and provocative novel (following A Cure for Suicide, 2015), Lucia seizes her place among American literature's brainy, questioning, besieged, and determined young female narrators, from Frankie in The Member of the Wedding (1946) to her contemporaries in Joe Meno's Office Girl (2012), Stephanie Kuehnert's Ballads of Suburbia (2009), and Michelle Latiolais' She (2016). Lucia lives with her kind, utterly unconventional, and penniless aunt in a converted garage because her father is dead and her mother is institutionalized. Her most cherished possession is her father's Zippo lighter, and no one could be more primed for joining the secret Arson Club than she. Ball's pitch-perfect voicing is mesmerizing as Lucia chronicles her experiences to help her make sense of her predicament. A pithy, deadpan-funny, scalpel-sharp, and, beneath her flinty adolescent bravura, deeply compassionate observer, Lucia recounts her increasingly harrowing misadventures and presents a fiery manifesto about the ethics of arson that targets the wealthy ruling class to protest the system that demoralizes and brutalizes the majority of living people. Readers will share Ball's adoration of this incisive and valiant young survivor from whom life cruelly subtracts nearly everything but her incandescent intellect, blazing wit, and radiant sense of justice.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

Starred review from June 1, 2016

Lucia Stanton is a highly intelligent yet deeply troubled teenager with a long-dead father and a mother in a mental institution. She lives with her eccentric aunt in a converted garage. Angry, disaffected, and in a new high school where she finds few kindred spirits, Lucia becomes involved with a group of equally disaffected youth with anarchist leanings called the Arson Club, who view burning down buildings as a political act, a way to express their disenchantment with the state of society. A caring teacher offers Lucia a potential escape from her difficult situation through a chance to attend a prestigious high school that caters to precocious, disquieted youth. However, a run-in with the law as a result of her relationship with some of the more active members of the Arson Club will cost her this opportunity, leading to her quitting school and eventually to homelessness when her aunt dies unexpectedly. Ball's articulate and utterly frank protagonist is something of a Holden Caulfield (Catcher in the Rye) for the 21st century, struggling to find the authentic beyond the hypocrisy of the world around her. VERDICT A startling, unsettling, and significantly memorable novel. [See Prepub Alert, 1/25/16.]--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2016

If you didn't know Ball's off-kilter, engagingly experimental writing by the time 2014's Silence Once Begun became a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, surely you started reading him when last year's A Cure for Silence was long-listed for the National Book Award. And here's another chance, with a book billed as character-driven and more approachable than Ball's previous work. Her father dead and her mother institutionalized, sharp-tongued, sharp-witted Lucia lives with her aunt and gets herself thrown out of school after school. At the latest one, she's drawn to the secret Arson Club, a great place to meet like-minded teenagers, but you know it sounds bad. With a five-city tour.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2016

Lucia Stanton is a highly intelligent yet deeply troubled teenager with a long-dead father and a mother in a mental institution. She lives with her eccentric aunt in a converted garage. Angry, disaffected, and in a new high school where she finds few kindred spirits, Lucia becomes involved with a group of equally disaffected youth with anarchist leanings called the Arson Club, who view burning down buildings as a political act, a way to express their disenchantment with the state of society. A caring teacher offers Lucia a potential escape from her difficult situation through a chance to attend a prestigious high school that caters to precocious, disquieted youth. However, a run-in with the law as a result of her relationship with some of the more active members of the Arson Club will cost her this opportunity, leading to her quitting school and eventually to homelessness when her aunt dies unexpectedly. Ball's articulate and utterly frank protagonist is something of a Holden Caulfield (Catcher in the Rye) for the 21st century, struggling to find the authentic beyond the hypocrisy of the world around her. VERDICT A startling, unsettling, and significantly memorable novel. [See Prepub Alert, 1/25/16.]--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.