How to Set a Fire and Why by Jesse Ball
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I guess this is a pretty good anarchist novel. Is it meant to be YA? Either way. It’s YA Fight Club minus the multiple personalities. It’s not really what I come to a Jesse Ball novel for, but it does give you that feeling, as I believe it was Terry Pratchett who once said, of having a red-hot vest sewn on underneath your skin, which I think is really hard to do and is a testament to his skill.
Still. I feel like if you have a whole family of anarchists and a daughter born into the family who’s coming of age, you should have her maybe start to question anarchy at some point in the book. Especially when the book is about anarchy. You can have a hero with a clear philosophy of life, who ends the novel having found a better way, or a hero who ends the novel having come back to where they started — but an anarchist hero whose parents and grandparent are anarchist, and who stays anarchist the whole novel? Maybe the self-doubt was there but was just too subtle for me to pick up on.
Anyway, pretty good story. I liked it.
View all my reviews