Review: With the Fire on High

With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There’s a wonderfully edgy scene near the beginning of this Young Adult novel: Emoni describes her first sexual experience at the age of 14. It’s underwhelming, and she doesn’t understand it. So, gifted cook that she is, she returns home and unconsciously interprets it into the language of food. She fries up a plantain (“that’s Dr. Freud sitting at table 3!”), slices it into separate bites, and looks at the small, oily residue at the end of the meal.

And that scene is emblematic of a potentially radical look at the life of a half-Puerto-Rican/half African-American single mother who’s trying to navigate her senior year of high school. I love, for instance, that it takes the first 50 or 60 pages for us even to glimpse a boy/man in her life. Yeah, there are the occasional visits from “Baby Girl’s” father Tyrone, but he’s hardly a complication. He’s mostly disappointing, but at least he lets her down on schedule. She isn’t pining for him, nor is she at all tempted to define herself by anything like desire for him.

This is a book that, for its first third and probably a good bit more, aces the Bechdel test and shows us a girl with more than enough on her mind to worry about what a man thinks of her. Emoni is in a tough situation, but she doesn’t define herself by her problems. She’s hardly interested in a boyfriend, instead spending her energy raising her daughter, enjoying her best friend’s advice – and the best friend is, mostly unremarkably, a lesbian – and refining the recipes she gets from her dead mother’s sister. She’s an artist in the kitchen, but she’s also in a position of having to learn the skills that underline and define that art. She’s a girl on the brink of becoming a woman, but she’s also someone trying to juggle the demands of weeks torn between school and parenting.

As this goes on, it does become more conventional. There is a boy, Malachi, who recognizes her as the deep and compelling character we know her to be, and he makes his interest clear. That teenage romance becomes more and more important, but to Acevedo’s real credit, it still never defines the central matter of the novel. It’s also the case that, even with so many odds against her, Emoni shines out as a potential professional chef.

What ties all this together, though, is the consistently impressive – and occasionally gorgeous – prose of Acevedo. I understand that she has had success as a poet, and it shows. It’s not easy to write about how food tastes, certainly not time after time, yet Acevedo does it. Each time Emoni has a cooking breakthrough, we get a fresh description.

At some level, you can see the calculation here. This is a book that checks all the boxes for what you’d want in a novel to teach in, say, 8th to 10th grades. It’s female-centered, honest and contemporary in its exploration of young sexuality and the relationships that follow, reflective of different ethnic cultures, and thoughtful in navigating the path to adulthood.

All of this is so well done, though, that it’s hard to hold that calculated quality too much against it. I plan to recommend it to friends and former students who teach at the high school level, and – in ways that would have surprised me if I’d known what I was getting into when I picked it up thinking it was a work of adult literary fiction – I enjoyed it very much.


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