Review: Tillmon County Fire by Pamela Ehrenberg
Title: Tillmon County Fire
Author: Pamela Ehrenberg
Genre: contemporary young adult fiction
Source: Bookshare
Reason for Reading: I thought the synopsis looked interesting, and when I was reading this last week, I was looking for short, low-stress books to get me through the holidays. This book isn’t long, though I’m not sure it was a good choice if I wanted light reading.
Synopsis: Two teenagers in a small Appalachian town perform an anti-gay hate crime, which effects the rest of the teenagers in the town in various ways.
My Thoughts: I really liked the execution of this book. I love programs like This American Life, which tell very human, personal stories in a variety of ways. In some ways, I felt as if this book was a good example of a TAL episode given fictional form.
There’s not really much of a plot. We all know who started the fire, but the fun part of the book is trying to figure out why, and learning more about the motivations of each of the characters. And these kids are real. Their voices felt authentic to me, and I never once had to suspend my disbelief that I was reading about teenagers. (In fact, in the case of Amelia, who writes in txt speak and doesn’t bother with capitalization or much in the way of punctuation, they were a bit too real.
I enjoyed reading this book, but I also would have liked to see more. There wasn’t a whole lot to the story, and I felt like the characterization was a bit shallow. I would have liked to have seen a few scenes drawn out more fully. And there were storylines that I wasn’t sure should have been included, like Amelia’s online romance that goes very wrong, which lasts for pages and pages. I also didn’t quite think the final resolution worked for me. It made things a bit too easy, and since the book had been focusing a lot on the complications of the lives of these kids, having there be a simple explanation for it all made everything a bit too pat.
In the end, though I did enjoy this book, I think it was trying a bit too hard to tackle too many issues at once, and didn’t entirely succeed.
Final Thoughts: It was a good story, dealing with interesting issues in a thoughtful manner, but it tried too hard to cover too much and so it didn’t really work for me as well as it could, so I suspect I’ll end up forgetting about it.
Final Grade: C