★ 03/11/2019
“On Monday, my house disappeared,” begins this quietly devastating graphic memoir. In 2017, Fies (Mom’s Cancer) and his wife, Karen, lost their home to the Sonoma County wildfires. Fies posted sketches about their experience online as it happened, then expanded the hastily drawn strips (included at the end of the book) into this measured, well-researched account. Despite the pain he and his wife endure sifting through the ashes, Fies goes light on sentimentality, instead focusing on the realities of surviving the crisis and rebuilding literally from the ground up. Moving beyond his own experience, Fies shares the “fire stories” of other Sonomans, illustrating “the comfort and horror of realizing you’re not alone.” It’s the small details that give the telling weight: the black puddles of liquefied trash cans; the remains of Christmas decorations; how Fies has to tell his car insurer that he no longer has a license plate because the car melted; the search and rescue teams checking bedsprings for human bones. The clean, simple art, tinted in bright spot colors, gives the material breathing room and makes the characters relatable. Without pleading or preaching, this affecting record guides readers through the experience of enormous loss, then out through the other side. (Mar.)
Subtle and heart-wrenching.
As striking as it is detailed.
An effective snapshot of a broad disaster.
“…a full-length graphic novel that shifts between his own tragedy and the larger picture of how the blaze devastated his Santa Rosa community. Breakout stories spotlighting some of his neighbors deepen the book’s emotional tug.”
It’s a moving and informative piece of journalism, one that relates not only the Fies couple’s ordeal, but the experiences of others.
""A Fire Story" has the feel of a touchstone book, something that will only (sadly) gain relevance as more and more of us are displaced by severe weather incidents that take our loved ones and our possessions, wiping away whole neighborhoods. It's exquisitely and subtly told.
‘I inhaled my neighbors’ lives.’ Brian Fies‘s description of his first sensory encounter after a fire destroyed his entire neighborhood took my own breath away in this powerful graphic account of a family’s loss from the devastating California wildfires. Though a heartbreaking read, Brian still inspires with his honesty and humanity while taking us on a journey of recovery after losing both home and possessions.
A Fire Story is a perfect storm of a book, an individual graphic memoir that tells the larger story of a community, a comic that is the result of both long years of work and a viral internet sensation, a literal perfect storm of weather and human behavior that resulted in one of the most devastating wildfires of all time.
A Fire Story is that most potent of accounts, both immediate yet timeless. Brian Fies’s deceptively simple words and pictures drew me in from page one, then delivered a triple punch to the gut: clutching dread, followed by hollow despair, and ultimately quiet, unquenchable determination. You don’t merely read this, you feel it.
Fies' personal, journalistic writing is more than matched by his massively appealing, bright, and pleasantly old-school comics style . . . Sometimes incorporating photographs and often communicating emotion with color, he affectingly relates the grief, rage, and powerlessness of losing one's home and possessions; each time he remembers another thing he's lost—home videos he'd been meaning to digitize, for instance—the pain feels brand-new again. Inviting, empathy-driven, and ultimately hopeful in the face of hardship.
A Fire Story grabs you from the first page, drawing you in with its harrowing and uplifting tale of loss, survival, and the power of community. Fies is a master storyteller who uses his skills as a cartoonist to create deeply personal stories with lasting impact.
Brian Fies sat down with some Sharpies and some paper to process his pain the way he knows best. He began to draw. The result is A Fire Story . . . a webcomic that recounts the heart-wrenching devastation the California wildfires has wrought. Fies is a graphic novelist, one of the best in his field. A few years ago, when his mom was battling terminal cancer, he processed his grief by writing the comic Mom’s Cancer. It won an Eisner Award, one of the comic world’s highest achievements. Now he’s had to do it all over again.
The unimaginable has been laid out on the page by author and artist Brian Fies. Brian’s own story provides the framework, but he also incorporates the vivid recollection of others to paint a picture of a horrendous night and its aftermath. A Fire Story is more than just a graphic novel, it is journalism and memoir at its best.
A Fire Story is urgent first-person journalism, encompassing the wider stories of fellow survivors and global climate change.
★ 05/01/2019
In 2017, California wildfires drove author-illustrator Fies (Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?) from his California home with his wife and some scant possessions. In the days after, Fies chronicled his story through a webcomic, created from scans of his Sharpie-drawn pages. Now he has expanded the narrative to include the months following the disaster, incorporating the accounts of fellow survivors. Much like his Eisner Award–winning Mom's Cancer, this book is heartrending. The art is cartoonish (bringing to mind Calvin & Hobbes), which helps ease the sadness. There's a brief moment of profanity (as the author stares at the ruins of his home), but there is otherwise no explicit content. Some readers may not want to read the wordy side stories, but they can be skipped in favor of the core tale of Fies and his family. VERDICT In an era of increasing national disasters, this book will help teens understand the impact of tragic events. A must for most collections.—Tammy Ivins, University of North Carolina at Wilmington
