How to Set a Fire and Why
Jesse Ball
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
How to Set a Fire and Why
Jesse Ball
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
...the most remarkable achievement of this novel, is its narrative voice. It belongs to Lucia Stanton, the novel’s disaffected, Holden Caulfield-style young narrator and heroine. Lucia is a marvelous creation and the richness of her voice — its intelligence, its casual precision — is felt on the very first page.
One of the triumphs of the novel is the delicacy with which Ball opens his narrator’s smart-aleck voice just wide enough to admit a sincere measure of wonder and dread.
How to Set a Fire and Why is about as close to verisimilitude as Ball usually gets.
...while it’s true that the story of her rebellious youth is intensely predictable, it’s also extremely well done: swift, sharp-tongued and enlivened by cockeyed humor. Mr. Ball has proven his knack for surreal, experimental fictions; now he shows that he can inject energy into more familiar material as well..
In 14-year-old Lucia Stanton, the putative author of the book, Ball has created a voice that echoes the beloved narrators of J.D. Salinger and John Green.
How To Set A Fire And Why deliberately keeps Lucia at a distance from readers, and the result is that she sometimes feels more like a too-clever trope than a person.
Jesse Ball, in his sixth and best novel, How to Set a Fire and Why, creates a literary figure who stands as one of the great angst-ridden and misfit teenagers in contemporary American literature.
Lucia burns through conventional wisdom, bureaucracy, and other forms of social and institutional manipulation like, well, fire. Even in the book’s darkest moments, her self-assured moxie is powerfully uplifting. Lucia does not spare anyone’s feelings, she is not polite, she speaks her mind, and when the situation calls for it she is brave..
The great pleasure of How to Set a Fire lies in keeping up with Lucia's challenging and amusing trains of thought, and in measuring the distance between her intelligence and your own. The book is a meditation on the idea of nothingness. But while Lucia may be a nihilist, you can't say she's unhappy about the pointlessness of it all. If anything, she burns extra bright..