BURN DOWN THIS WORLD

A middle-aged woman looks back on the romance of revolutionary politics in her youth in this novel.

In 1998, Celeste reflects on the past: “I arrived on the campus of the University of Florida in the fall of 1971, ready to join the fray….I wanted to be a part of those at the ragged fringe.” As she thinks back, her Florida home is threatened by raging wildfires along the state’s eastern coast. Her 14-year-old son, Evan, vacillates between moody and moodier; her mother, who has dementia, is living in a nursing home nearby. The last thing that she needs is her estranged brother, Reid, a poet, returning home after years of hitchhiking. But according to a verse that he scrawled on a postcard, he is, in fact, coming home, and Celeste must revisit and renegotiate her relationship with her free-spirited sibling. This conjures memories of Celeste’s revolutionary days, fighting in the streets with him when they were both students at the University of Florida in the early 1970s. She recalls protesting the Vietnam War, joining feminist consciousness-raising groups, and falling in love. Over the course of this novel, Egnoski employs plenty of humor and luscious detail to help to bring the world of protest politics to life, and along the way, she also manages to effectively relate the visceral passion of youth. Celeste herself is shown to be a smart, charming narrator (“Betty Friedan had been counting on me to change the world”). At the heart of the book is the protagonist’s struggle to forgive and to remember without losing herself. However, despite the book’s rich subject matter, it often breezes through key events, thus missing opportunities for greater emotional depth.

A tenderhearted, if somewhat rushed, story of passion, radicalism, and moving on.