Valente is a sorceress...This is a gorgeous book full of mysteries. It scorches with truth, and sings with hope. Valente writes like all of our lives depend on it.
Lyrical, mysterious, and structurally innovative...This is a book we need now more than ever.
08/08/2016
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. (Oct.)
Valente’s beautiful, elegiac novel about a community in mourning, and the unseen forces that unravel and consume us after a tragedy, is a work of heartbreaking timeliness.” — J. Ryan Stradal, New York Times bestselling author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest
“Haunting...Written in the collective voice...à la Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, Valente artfully employs...newspaper articles, and biographies of teh victims on the way to an unforgettable ending, with fire serving as a powerfully fitting metaphor for grief, loss...and the nature of fate.” — Publishers Weekly
“Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down is a beautifully written, lyrical book wrapped up in a compelling mystery with shades of Stephen King. Gripping and profound, a terrific debut.” — Kate Hamer, author of The Girl in the Red Coat
“Breathtaking...Riveting characters...This reader found herself increasingly spellbound by this remarkable and urgent debut novel.” — Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me
“Valente is a sorceress...This is a gorgeous book full of mysteries. It scorches with truth, and sings with hope. Valente writes like all of our lives depend on it.” — Diane Cook, author of Man V. Nature
“Pulsing, eerie, and impossible to put down...In a cultural moment in which mass violence is shockingly prevalent, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down is that rare gift; a book that is as resonant as it is surprising, as timely as it is soulful.” — Chloe Benjamin, author of The Anatomy of Dreams
“Gripping, visceral...I couldn’t stop readingor caring about these characters...There’s a tinge of mythic eeriness to this story...but it was the resilient, appealing characters who propelled me through this intense novel, and lingered long after its close.” — Sharon Guskin, author of The Forgetting Time
“One of the most compelling novles I’ve read in years.” — Matt Bell, author of Scrapper
“Lyrical, mysterious, and structurally innovative...This is a book we need now more than ever.” — Kelly Luce, author of Pull Me Under
One of the most compelling novles I’ve read in years.
Valente’s beautiful, elegiac novel about a community in mourning, and the unseen forces that unravel and consume us after a tragedy, is a work of heartbreaking timeliness.
Breathtaking...Riveting characters...This reader found herself increasingly spellbound by this remarkable and urgent debut novel.
Gripping, visceral...I couldn’t stop readingor caring about these characters...There’s a tinge of mythic eeriness to this story...but it was the resilient, appealing characters who propelled me through this intense novel, and lingered long after its close.
Pulsing, eerie, and impossible to put down...In a cultural moment in which mass violence is shockingly prevalent, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down is that rare gift; a book that is as resonant as it is surprising, as timely as it is soulful.
2016-08-09
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.