Our House Is on Fire

March 15, 2020
A collective portrait of activist Greta Thunberg's family, encompassing not only climate change, but also issues of mental health. In this moving text, Swedish opera singer Malena Ernman, her husband, Svante Thunberg, and their daughters, Greta and Beata, stitch together vignettes about "burned-out people on a burned out planet." Before Greta stepped into the public eye with her 2018 strike outside the Swedish Parliament, she had fallen into depression. Ernman details the end of her music career, when Greta refused to eat or speak. Through distilled recollections, she elucidates how autism and selective mutism unfolded in her household, with all its initial hardship, and how Swedish society views spectrum disorders in general. When Greta was finally diagnosed with Asperger's and OCD, and Beata with ADHD and other conditions, the family found a measure of solace. But they still struggled: "We scream. We kick down doors. We scratch. We pound walls. We wrestle. We cry. We ask for help and we somehow endure." The narrative delivers a potent, challenging, and heartening portrayal of a family's struggle to hold it all together. The text is more problematic when it conflates environmental issues--such as sustainability and the climate crisis--with mental health problems, positing that society's prioritization of economy over ecology has led to increasing isolation and desperation. While provocative, the argument feels grounded in simplified conviction. Passages about carbon emissions, damage wrought by air travel, the failure of world leaders to take charge, and related issues are unabashedly alarmist and valuable. Because these elements echo Greta's many speeches, they come off as repetitive in the book. The buildup to Greta's strike--and the strike itself--is an inspiring depiction of the teen who has become a leader on the world stage and of the family who supports her behind the scenes. It also represents a courageous triumph over many of her demons. An impassioned call to action and a vulnerable family portrait of neurodiversity.

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Starred review from March 1, 2020
The personal is political, but even more fundamentally the personal is environmental. Every human is dependent on the biosphere, yet, in spite of dire warnings about fossil fuels and global warming, we've failed to mobilize. Enter a young Swedish activist, Greta Thunberg, who, with preternatural poise and deep, lucid understanding of climate change and the urgency it demands, courageously speaks truth to power. So clarion is Greta's uncompromising call to action, Time magazine named her Person of the Year, and now this blazingly candid family memoir reveals the grueling and bewildering struggles that propelled Greta onto the world stage. When we first meet her, she is unable to eat or speak, battered by bullying and in shock over environmental abominations. After much anguish and effort and a diagnosis which includes Asperger's, Greta slowly regains her strength, forges her conviction, and embarks on the school strike outside the Swedish parliament which launched her galvanizing global campaign. Narrated primarily by her mother, opera singer Malena Ernman, with passages from Greta, her sister, and their father, and written in brief, hard-hitting "scenes," this is an unnerving and profoundly enlightening chronicle of the symbiosis between human and planetary health as manifest within one remarkable family whose painful awakening to our acute sustainability crisis should embolden us all.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)