Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down

August 8, 2016
The specter of the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999 hangs over Valente’s haunting first novel. At Louis and Clark High School outside St. Louis, Mo., in 2003, a junior kills 28 students and seven faculty members in a shooting. Four of the survivors are juniors on the yearbook staff—Matt, Nick, Christina, and Zola—who spend the weeks after the tragedy trying to process the event. But that becomes impossible when, one after another, the houses belonging to the dead students’ families are burned down. Matt’s father, a police officer, works on the fire investigation but is hard-pressed for answers. The most confounding piece of evidence in every case is that the bodies of the family members appear to have been incinerated out of existence—a scientific impossibility. While Matt deals with his closeted lover, Tyler, Christina tries to care for her wounded boyfriend, Ryan, and Zola looks up at the stars for comfort, Nick turns to the Internet for answers as to what might have caused the fires. As these characters try to put their lives back together, the house fires continue, threatening to engulf the entire community. Written in the collective voice of the community, à la Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, Valente (By Light We Knew Our Names) artfully employs short chapters on arson and anatomy, as well as diagrams, newspaper articles, and biographies of the victims on the way to an unforgettable ending, with fire serving as a powerfully fitting metaphor for grief, loss, and our inability to comprehend the nature of fate. Agent: Kerry D’Agostino, Curtis Brown.

A high school shooter kills 36, including himself, and then a series of house fires annihilates the bereaved families."Three days after Caleb Raynor opened fire, the first house burned to the ground." Valente's debut tracks four survivors of a St. Louis-area high school massacre from their hiding places during the rampage through the grief-stricken weeks ahead, when, amid the funerals, the surviving families of the victims are incinerated in their sleep, so completely that no bodies are found. The chapters alternate between a collective first-person voice--"We stayed in. We did not move"--and close-up narration following Matt, Zola, Nick, and Christina as they attempt to process what they have been through and write profiles of their dead classmates for the yearbook. Additionally, there are chapters titled "A Brief History of Containment," "A Brief History of Cremation (Or How The Body Burns)," and so on, which deliver big chunks of factual information, poetically phrased. Matt was in the restroom making out with his boyfriend and exited to find his friend Caroline Black dead on the floor in a pool of blood. Zola was in the library, where the most people were killed--her memories are beyond description. Christina's and Nick's classes were spared a visit from the shooter, but Christina's boyfriend was shot in the leg. A new set of devastating images haunts the four as the house fires begin, "the charring of so many homes that had held bodies that had held memories, a matryoshka of grief." The novel itself is a matryoshka of grief, piling surreal tragedy on top of truth-inspired tragedy to poor effect. We never learn anything about the shooter or his motives, and the resolution of the mystery plot simply doesn't fly. Valente is a promising writer. She should write something else. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 1, 2016
Not long after a teenage gunman rampages through a St. Louis high school, killing 35 people, the fires start, fires that consume the homes and families of those who died in the school, leaving no survivors of the conflagrations andimprobablynot even a trace of their dead bodies. How this could be and who is responsible for the fires are questions that plague public-safety officials and the book's protagonists, four surviving students, all staff members of the student yearbook, who begin their own de facto investigation: Nick, who is a compulsive researcher; Zola, the staff photographer; and staff writers Christina and Matt, whose father is a forensics specialist with the police department. Answers to the puzzling questions raised by the fires are very slow in coming in this deliberately paced novel that takes itself very seriously, so seriously as to seem, at times, self-important as it strives for a significance larger than the story it tells. Despite this, the characterizations are acute and the resolution, though ambiguous, is tantalizingly thought provoking.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)