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A teenage arsonist sets her world on fire in McKee’s latest YA novel.

Heat Agaki, track star senior at Sky-Bound Private High School, hates her parents (Mr. Author and Mrs. Publisher) and all the other “lickspittles” that surround her. Her lone friend is Sarah Smith, who encourages Heat to try harder to be pleasant and maybe find a boyfriend. The only thing Heat is interested in, though, is fire. She’s already set 20 around town. So far, she’s managed to elude detection…that is, until she burns down the house of her classmate, bookish loner Mori, who sees Heat enjoying the fire from the nearby woods. Rather than be resentful, Mori is impressed by Heat’s work. “I won’t tell anybody, Agaki,” she says. “Nobody would believe me. And we both know. That house deserved to burn.” Heat, who suffers from vivid dreams and visions related to the fires, finds a kindred spirit in Mori, who is plagued by hallucinations due to her schizophrenia. What’s more, Mori wants in on the arson. As the spree continues, and with a dogged detective hot on their trail, Heat has increasing trouble figuring out what is real and what is imaginary…and where the fire ends and Heat begins. McKee’s prose is full of voice and playful textual tricks—bolded text, italics, varied text size, and other stylizations—that imbue the story with a frantic energy. Heat’s narration is either snarkily self-aware or breathlessly dramatic, as here when she realizes Mori knows her secret: “My heart sank. Or rather. A pit opened up in my stomach, and my heart fell into it. Yeah. That’s it. My heart dropped. It felt like my tongue was being pulled back into my throat. I wanted to puke. I wanted to puke. I really, really wanted to puke.” (Each of those sentences is its own paragraph.) The author does not ground the story in a recognizable reality. As a result, the more surreal elements don’t pack as much of a punch as they should.

A flashy but sometimes grating novel about teenage angst and mental health.