Review: Burnt Out

Title: Burnt Out

Author: Victoria Brookman

Publisher: 5th January 2021 by HarperCollins Publishers Australia

Pages: 352 pages

How I Read It: ARC book

Genre: contemporary

My Rating: 4.5 crowns

Synopsis:

How do you start again when your life is a smoking ruin?

She lost everything in a bushfire and became the celebrity face of climate change. But is fame and living with a billionaire all it's cracked up to be? A warm and witty story for our times.

'Here's to rising from the ashes ...'

Calida Lyons is having a very bad week. She's long past deadline for her still unwritten second novel; her husband has just left her; and her Blue Mountains community is being threatened by bushfires. Just as she hits rock bottom, she's forced to shelter with neighbours while a fire incinerates everything she owns.

Devastated and emotional in front of news cameras, Cali delivers a blistering, unfiltered rebuke to the nation's rich to do something.

Her rant goes viral, and she quickly becomes the latest celebrity face of the climate movement. Soon she's offered a harbourside refuge by handsome tech billionaire Arlo Richard, her publisher is delighted with the new novel she's writing, and she's the darling of high society.

But things aren't as they seem. It's all built on lies, and Cali's pretty sure that the precarious house of cards she's built is about to come tumbling down.

My Thoughts

" … things have been quite hectic. I’m actually just evacuating. Right now.’ 

‘’Evacuating? Oh pet, you poor thing. Are you all right?’ 

‘Well, this is the third time in the past six weeks, so I don't really know what to think anymore ...’ 

'Of course, of course. I don’t know how you put up with the trauma of it all.’

From the turn of the first page, Burnt Out captures your attention and keeps a tight grip. Anyone who has lived through bushfires (particularly Australia’s catastrophic Black Summer fires of 2019-2020) cannot help but become immersed in the opening chapters of Victoria’s book. As the sky alights and smoke makes breathing near impossible, Victoria takes you to that moment in time when fire erupts all around. Scary, confronting and unforgettable.

The fallout from these catastrophic fires is felt across many levels. Burnt Out is multidimensional and cleverly crafted as Victoria breaks down for readers how Australian’s are confronting a number of issues. First up, and a logical follow on from the opening chapters, is climate change and global warming. Victoria offers viewpoints from social media, to government, to the rich and powerful and it's all done so engagingly without the reader drowning in the politics of it all. 

‘Once upon a time, it felt like having political opinions had been her entire identity. 

But at some point, she’d taken that identity off, like a coat carefully hung on a hook by the door and never worn again. It had never been her plan. It had just happened like that.’

However, there is much more to this tale than meets the eye. Yes, it’s about the environment and exploitation, truth versus fallacy in what the public is told. Yet, running parallel to this overarching story, is that of a woman who lost everything - literally and figuratively - on that eventful day. Victoria gives her readers a contemporary tale about a woman who is facing a crisis on many fronts (pardon the fire pun) from her relationship to her career. 

‘I don’t know ... I feel like I get up there and say all the stuff people want to hear, and then I go home to the same old me: scared, anxious, alone and fully expecting my star to wane, for it all to be over soon.’

At its heart, this is a story of a young woman who, having lost everything, didn’t know where to turn or who to trust. Yet through her passion she begins to remove the untruths to discover her own truth and make her own way in life. It’s about how people can make decisions that can have a positive impact by just being themselves. At times Cali is hard to like and cheer for but that just demonstrates her humanness I guess. 

Congratulations Victoria on a splendid debut that is sure to generate much discussion. It’s contemporary, it's current and it offers readers much food for thought on issues, both broad and personal, that affect us all. 

This review is based on a complimentary copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own. The quoted material may have changed in the final release.