DIRT ON FIRE

A newly orphaned Los Angeles street punk, deposited in the countryside, learns to love the land in this coming-of-age YA novel.

Fifteen-year-old Ry Kinkead hangs around drug dealers and sex workers and cultivates sardonic alienation in an LA slum, but when his mother, Evangeline, overdoses, he’s sent to live with his deceased father’s sister, Thalia Kinkead, and her husband, Pete—both complete strangers—on their Loam, California, ranch. Ry warily settles into a family seething with tensions between Thalia, who’s snobbish and racist; the sympathetic but beaten-down Pete; and their obnoxious teenage son, LG, who hates working the land. Ry does, too, but he grudgingly does “useless farm crap” on the family’s cattle and walnut ranch, dreams of LA, and hangs with two new classmates: Paulie, the son of Mexican farmworkers and a provider of decent cannabis, and Melissa, who helpfully criticizes Ry as their relationship deepens. Ry’s attitude changes when he encounters a runaway horse belonging to neighbor Frame Ellis. In exchange for riding lessons, he helps out on Frame’s organic farm; he has a conversion experience when he realizes that “everything underneath my feet was freakin’ alive….If there’d been a church devoted to cucumber worship, I would’ve joined.” Then someone is involved in a catastrophic accident, Ry’s horse faces unforeseen difficulties, and a mysterious letter reveals dark family secrets. Smith’s fish-out-of-water tale features colorful characters sketched through evocative details, as when Pete is described as moving “like a few bones were doing all the work and the rest were just kicked back for the ride.” The novel also offers a rich, fine-grained portrait of rural life seen through the eyes of an exasperated young outsider. Ry is an appealing Gen-Z Huck Finn, an urban wiseass who slowly grows a horse-whisperer’s soul: “It took me a couple of seconds of frantically holding on to the saddle horn to understand the beat of the ride….My hips moved with that, a rhythm shared with Cherokee while everything else fell away.” The result is a captivating read.

A vibrant, twisty, and entertaining yarn about an unlikely transplant growing deep roots.