Not on Fire but Burning begins with the premise that in about 2030 a silvery object appears in the air over San Francisco, destroys the Golden Gate Bridge and sets off a nuclear blast. These events are seen through the eyes of Skyler, an 18 year old girl, who is spending the summer away from her family in Sonoma, waitressing and writing.  Among her last thoughts are that it is random chance that she chose, and was allowed by her parents, to be in San Francisco at this moment, and she worries about the welfare of her 3 year old brother Dorian.
      The scene jumps then jumps forward 8 years to a very different world. It has never been determined who set off the nuclear blast, but the fear of terrorism looms, and Moslems have been gathered into camps in the Dakotas, much as were the Japanese during WW II.  Dorian, now 11, begins having dreams of his dead sister, but there is a twist: his parents do not remember having a daughter, and believe that his sister is the product of his imagination.  They know that about the age that the sister would have been born, the mother Kathryn had had an abortion.  At this point, the story is much like that in The Discreet Hero (see my review in an earlier post), in which an adolescent boy distresses his parents by describing the appearances of an apparently imaginary figure named Edilberto Torres. In the present book, the parents belittle Dorian's dreams, until he comes across an old family photo at the beach, in which a reflection in the mother's sunglasses reveal that the photo was taken by a little girl.
While this is going on, there are parallel stories of two adolescents, Dorian and Karim, a Muslim refugee from the camps, now adopted by an elderly neighbor who is dealing with his own guilt from his participation in 'Gulf War III'. In both cases they have been brought up in an atmosphere of suspicion and hate.  Ultimately both are pushed by extremists in their own group to act on their hatred, and their struggle with the conflicting pressures of prejudice and their own better natures plays out at the end in a dramatic and surprising way.
         Throughout the book, Hrbek dwells on the importance of choices, and suggests that every time a choice is made, parallel worlds are created in which the outcomes of each alternative outcome survive. There might, for instance, be one world in which Skyler went to San Francisco for the summer and perished, and another world in which her mother made her stay in Sonoma, and she survived.  The notion of multiple parallel worlds seems important to the author and gives the book it's sci-fi feel.  I think the main theme could have been expressed without it.  The message is that with every decision we make, something is lost and something gained, and that we need to remember both. As he phrases it 'Every loss deserves a telling.'  Here the bigger loss is of an America that values tolerance for peoples of different origins. Without giving away the ending, Hrbek suggests there is hope for a way back.

 


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